The book The Great Transformation: Ideas for a World to Come has now been published, a translation and introduction by Iraqi novelist, essayist and translator Latifa al-Dulaimi, who passed away recently. It serves as her final work and message left open to the future. Al-Dulaimi completed it knowing, presumably, that knowledge does not stop with age and that a book can reach its readers even after the death of its author.
Al-Dulaimi died in Amman on 8 March 2026, a day after turning 87. She left behind a vast body of work distributed among novels, short stories, theatre, essays, articles and translation. Her death represented not only the loss of a notable Iraqi novelist, but of a singular cultural figure who combined the sensitivity of a creator, the precision of a translator, the passion of a researcher, and the determination of an intellectual defender of women's rights and civil liberties.
From her first collection of short stories, Passage towards the Sorrows of Men, published in 1970, al-Dulaimi carved out a unique path in Iraqi narrative. She did not treat women as a predetermined social issue or as a silent victim, but as a subject that thinks, desires, resists and rebuilds its own world in the midst of a turbulent environment. In works such as The World of Lonely Women, Who Inherits Paradise?, Seeds of Fire, Garden of Life and Lovers, Phonograph and Epochs, individual memory becomes intertwined with Iraqi history, and the fate of women becomes a gateway to questioning war, exile, violence, the city, power and devastation.
Her novels were inseparable from her intellectual concerns. Al-Dulaimi wrote as if the novel were a laboratory of knowledge, and imagination was not the opposite of thought but one of its deepest forms. She moved freely among narrative, philosophy, science, the history of civilisations and women's studies, without seeing closed boundaries between these fields. She believed that authentic culture emerges at the intersection of knowledge, and that a writer cannot understand human beings if she isolates literature from the transformations of science, technology and society.
Her last translation, The Great Transformation, reveals this vision with the greatest clarity. It contains a selection of essays and studies translated from English, written by scientists, philosophers, novelists and contemporary thinkers, on subjects such as intelligent narrative, the fifth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence, consciousness, physics, economics, the future of universities, freedom, luck, writing and the meaning of a good life. The texts do not present a closed thesis but are united by intellectual inquiry and the desire to re-examine certainties.
Al-Dulaimi wrote in her introduction to this book that there are two types of reading: one that satisfies a fleeting functional need, and another that reshapes our relationship with the world. She believed that her book belonged to the second type, for it does not promise final solutions but invites the reader to accompany the questions. This phrase perhaps sums up her entire project: for her, writing was not a means of distributing answers but a way of expanding the question, undermining certainties and training the mind in creative doubt.
For al-Dulaimi, translation was not a parallel or secondary activity to her writing and career, but an integral part of her cultural vision. She understood it as an act of housing ideas within Arabic, as an expansion of the boundaries of the library and of the reader. Through her translations, she brought works of novels, philosophy, science, criticism and futurology studies, from Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country and Anita Desai's Midday Light to books by Colin Wilson, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, Paul Davies and Martin Rees, as well as selections of dialogues from great novelists, scientists and philosophers.
She chose what to translate according to clear cultural needs, not merely for the fame of the author. She devoted herself to questions of the modern novel, the relationship between literature and philosophy, scientific and literary cultures, the future of humanity, artificial intelligence and the great transformations of knowledge. Her translations, viewed today, appear as parts of a unique and integrated project: to introduce the Arab reader to contemporary global debate while maintaining the clarity of language and the dignity of the idea.
Al-Dulaimi maintained a long cultural and human relationship with Dar Al-Mada publishing house. She was not simply an author or translator who contracted to publish a book, but one of the writers who contributed to shaping the identity and cultural project of the house. The publisher celebrated her as a distinguished Iraqi writer, translator and intellectual, and was dedicated to publishing her books and reissuing her earlier works to keep them available for new generations.
Al-Dulaimi's death interrupted the publication of this final volume, but the book bears her complete mark. Perhaps there is some consolation in the fact that the last thing to reach readers is a book about the world to come—she who spent her life looking beyond the present moment, seeking knowledge capable of withstanding loneliness, fear and certainty. The writer has gone, but the questions she chose remain alive, and the books she wrote and translated continue to open their windows onto the world.