Lotus was the trilingual (Arabic, English, and French) journal published by the Afro-Asian Writers Association from 1968 to 1991. Initially headquartered in Cairo, but with the French and English editions printed out of East Germany, the journal relocated to Beirut in 1973 following Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel and the consequent Arab boycott of Egypt, and again to Tunis in 1982 following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Lotus was discontinued in the early 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, which had provided the bulk of funding for the journal’s operations. There have been recent attempts to revive Lotus in the 2010s, but with mixed success. The editors-in-chief of Lotus was Yusuf Sebai in the Cairo years, Faiz Ahmed Faiz in the Beirut years, and Ziyad Abdel Fattah in the Tunis years. The print run was around 5,000 copies, and, with the exception of some bookstores, the readership was mostly by subscription. Issues of the magazine ranged between 80 and 150 pages, and were richly illustrated throughout. The content included a variety of genres, from academic essays to poems, from transcriptions of important speeches to political manifestos, from short stories to conference motions and resolutions, from readers’ letters to reports on important world events… read more