Marlé Hammond is a scholar, editor and translator specialising in classical and modern Arabic literature, popular narrative and comparative poetics. She is Reader in Arabic Popular Literature and Culture at SOAS University of London, where her research encompasses Arabic poetry, women’s writing, folkloric narrative, Egyptian and Arab cinema, and the movement of literary forms across historical and cultural contexts.

Her publications include The Tale of al-Barrāq Son of Rawḥān and Laylā the Chaste: A Bilingual Edition and Study, which presents an Arabic popular epic alongside sustained literary and historical analysis, and A Dictionary of Arabic Literary Terms and Devices. Her wider research explores rhyme, wordplay, gendered voice, oral storytelling, double meaning and the ways that stories change as they are retold across different periods and media.

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