La Algola de Jerusalén. Meet the author and the translator
Instituto Cervantes in Amman organizes a meeting with the author of the novel “The Algola of Jerusalem”, Husam Darwish Abdul Latif, and its translator into Spanish, Kevin Mérida Capote.
Synopsis: In Jerusalem, pilgrims flow to churches, mosques and synagogues, bakers bake pita and children play soccer - all under the constant stalking of the Israeli army. However, there is one thing that this ubiquitous military presence cannot and will never be able to detect: the jinn that inhabit the city's subway ruins.
One of these spirits, the algola, has always occupied the mind of Husam Abdullatif, a Jordanian orthodontist of Palestinian origin. His grandmother instilled in him a fascination with the mischief that this enigmatic yet amiable being played in her family's Jerusalem home. One day, after finding an amulet that his grandfather used to protect himself from the creature, Husam decides to travel to the Holy City to discover the truth about it. This adventure will take readers through some of the holiest places in the world. Will we find the algola? In Jerusalem, anything is possible.
Husam Darwish Abdul Latif. "The Algola of Jerusalem" is the first book by Dr. Husam Darwish Abdullatif (Amman, Jordan, 1972). His Palestinian parents became exiles against their will when they found themselves working in the Jordanian capital when Israel occupied their native Jerusalem in 1967. Dr. Abdullatif received his dental degree from the University of Jordan in 1993 and completed his doctorate in orthodontics at Istanbul Marmara University in 2001. Since then, he has contributed articles and research to numerous Arabic publications, including Living Well magazine and the Jordanian daily newspaper Al-Dustour. He currently runs his own clinic in Amman.
Kevin Mérida Capote was born in Caracas, Venezuela in 1994, and is the great-grandson of a Palestinian immigrant who settled in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in the 1920s. He spent his childhood and adolescence between Venezuela, the Canary Islands and the United States, earning a degree in linguistics, Italian and French at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton, USA) in 2017. In 2021, he completed a master's degree in linguistic, literary and cultural studies at the University of Seville, producing a master's thesis on classical and mixed dialectal Arabic in texts written by Middle Eastern Christians between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kevin currently teaches English in Seville.
