Loading ...
Book Prize Highlights Arab Literature
There’s the Man Booker Prize, the National Book Award, and the Nobel Prize for Literature. And now there’s the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Associated with the UK’s Booker and funded by the Emirates Foundation, the award recognizes contemporary novelists who write in Arabic.
Women escaping their pasts and the Arab-Israeli conflict are among the themes tackled by six books shortlisted for the 2010 award, according to Reuters.
The award, worth $10,000 to each of the nominees and another $50,000 to the winner, honors works of prose fiction in Arabic, and the exposure it brings can mean publishing deals in English and other languages.
According to Reuters, in “The Lady from Tel Aviv,” Palestinian author Raba’i Madhoun looks at the Middle East conflict through the prism of a Palestinian exile returning home to Gaza after many years abroad and an Israeli sitting next to him on a flight to Tel Aviv.
The novel, “in its complexity, intricacy and ambiguity, avoids the dogma of ready-made ideology,” the judges said in a statement to Reuters.
Madhoun is up against two Egyptian writers, Muhammad Al-Mansi Qindeel for “A Cloudy Day on the West Side” and Mansoura Ez Eldin for “Beyond Paradise”.
“A Cloudy Day” is set in Egypt at the time of the great archaeological discoveries of the 1920s and tells the story of a young girl taken from her home when her mother is forced to flee her abusive husband.
“Beyond Paradise” centers around Salma, who writes her family history as a way of liberating herself from a painful past.
“America”, by Lebanon’s Rabee Jabir, is about Syrians who left their homelands to seek a new life in the United States, and “She Throws Sparks”, by Saudi Arabian Abdo Khal is a satire on the seductive power of life in the palace.
“When the Wolves Grow Old”, written by Jordanian Jamal Naji, rounds out the list of nominees and follows people who leave Amman’s poor quarters to find positions of wealth and power.
According to its website, the prize was officially announced in the United Arab Emirates in 2007. Advisors include Arab literary experts, publishers and journalists. Last year’s winner was Egyptian Yusef Zeydan for his novel “Beelzebub.”
The United Arab Emirates is traditionally a Bedouin culture with a spoken rather than written heritage. Leaders in Abu Dhabi realized a need to rekindle the great culture that produced Arab thinkers who contributed to Europe’s Renaissance and Africa’s centers of learning.
The Financial Times reported on the prize in 2008. “The Emirates Foundation, a charity set up by Abu Dhabi’s crown prince to develop the arts, culture and education, hopes that rewarding the best contemporary fiction will lead to a broader appreciation of the Middle Eastern prose, both among the region’s 300 million Arabic speakers and inter-nationally.”
Reuters reported that the winner will be announced in Abu Dhabi on March 2, 2010.
Yvonne Marcotte
Epoch Times