Emily Robbins's "A Word for Love"

Emily Robbins has lived and worked across the Middle East and North Africa. From 2007 to 2008, she was a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, where she studied religion and language with a women’s mosque movement and lived with the family of a leading intellectual. Robbins holds a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and and in 2016 she received a second Fulbright, to study in Jordan.

Here Robbins shares her choice for the director of an adaptation of her new novel, A Word for Love:

I have no idea whom I would want to play the main roles in A Word for Love, but I do know that my dream director is Sofia Coppola.

I remember seeing Lost in Translation when I was just beginning to study Arabic – it sums up the sense of being in a new place and new language, the overwhelming sense of this, so well. Her camera follows her main actresses with a lot of love. This is a movie full of understated female leads. I can imagine them really shining under Sofia Coppola’s camera.

Learn more about A Word for Love.

--Marshal Zeringue