Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad in conversation with Oscar Kocken

Nisrine Mbarki Ben Ayad (Tilburg, 1977) is a versatile writer, poet, columnist, translator, and program maker. She writes poetry, plays, and short stories, and as a literary translator, she brings Arabic poetry into Dutch, with five translations to her name. Her poems and columns regularly appear in literary magazines. In 2021, her poetry debut, Oeverloos, was published.

At Crossing Border, she will discuss her debut novel, Kookpunt (Boiling Point).

About Kookpunt
They live in Brussels. Algiers. Paris. Damascus. London. Casablanca. Cairo. Marrakech. Amsterdam. And yet, their lives intersect.

From a terrace in Brussels, Ydir watches the street below. Casual thoughts of a former lover and a rival transport him back to the nuclear experiments in his homeland, Algeria. At the height of the revolution, he first met Suad Antoon. Years later, she must part from her beloved when he enters a monastery.

Kookpunt is a novel made up of seven interconnected stories set across multiple cities and countries. Despite the distances between them, the seven characters’ lives touch and intertwine, painting a portrait of a fragmented world where, against all odds, people love deeply.