MAHMOUD HABBOUSH
Author, Essayist & Journalist
HUMES
Mahmoud Habboush's philosophical science-fiction novella is about artificial intimacy, dependency and invisible control.
"Who mates humes anymore?"
After one puff of semanticwhiff—the drug Corp has just withdrawn—Kat begins to wake.In her delirium, she suspects everything around her, from Corp and her dead mother’s holo to Kalibu, her corpmade botboy.Kalibu is changing too. Made to love her, he has begun pushing past the limits of his design.Now Kat is consumed by one question: what’s left of humes?
Essays
The Lost Consciousness of Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry
New Lines Magazine · September 2026
Centuries of interpretation have separated the self from the world, but glimpses of an older mode of being can still be found, even in the most inward-looking modern literature.
The Lost Consciousness of Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry
New Lines Magazine · May 2026
On Jahili poetry as evidence of an older consciousness, in which human beings, animals, place and time belonged to a single living order before the modern split between self and world.
Medieval Arabic Culinary Literature Offers Lessons for the Present
New Lines Magazine · March 2023
On nine surviving medieval Arabic cookbooks and what they reveal about the history, culture and literature of cooking and dining. Finalist, James Beard Foundation Media Award, Foodways.
Books
The Boy Who Never Laughed
Novel
A boy is born unable to laugh, but also unable to feel ordinary joy, sadness, anger or fear. The novel follows this almost purely logical being – a homo logicus – as he moves through suspicion, learning, power and love, and finds empathy by a road no one expected.
The Butterfly’s Dream
Translation with introductory essay
Selected Taoist texts from Zhuangzi, rendered into Arabic as a literary rather than academic translation. Old Chinese stories about stillness, craft, uselessness, death, doubt and wu wei, the Taoist art of acting without forcing the world.
Bio
Mahmoud Habboush is a Palestinian writer and journalist based in the UK. He has reported for Reuters and Bloomberg, and his essays have appeared in New Lines Magazine, where one of his pieces was named a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Media Award. His fiction, essays and criticism are preoccupied with consciousness, mortality, power and free will. His latest novella is HUMES.An early printing of HUMES credited the author as M. A. Habboush. Subsequent editions use his full name, Mahmoud Habboush. Both credits refer to the same author.
Contact
Get in touch with me at: [email protected]