Six writers and their mentors are currently at the ninth annual writers’ workshop hosted by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. They range in age from 26 to 40 and are from Oman, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, and Palestine.
The ninth writers’ workshop in Abu Dhabi hosted by the International Prize for Arabic Fiction started on December 12, 2017 in at the Arabian Nights Village resort in the Abu Dhabi desert. IPAF and its workshops, or nadwa, are under the patronage of the Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The event is a workshop for writers from North Africa and the Middle East, and is newly supported in this instance by the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (ADMAF), as part of the foundation’s Riwaq Al Adab wal Kitab initiative, a “book and literature” platform dedicated to supporting the literary industry in the UAE and Arab world. The foundation’s patron is Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan.
One of the two mentors at the workshop is novelist and academic Sahar Al Mougy of Egypt, a member of this year’s IPAF jury and author of Daria, given the 1998 Sharhah Girl’s Clubs Prize for Women’s Creative Writing. She teaches English literature and American studies in the English Department of Cairo University. The other program mentors is Mohammed Hasan Alwan of Saudia Arabia.
The Sudanese writer Mohanned Al Dabi has worked as an editor and manager of the cultural supplement of the Sudanese newspaper Al-Tayyar. His work Shadow won the 2014 Al-Tayib Saleh International Award for Creative Writing in the short story category. He has two published novels: Enchanters of the River Bank (2014) and The Violence of the Meteors (2016), and a short story collection, also titled Shadow (2016), and he has a forthcoming novel, The Forgotten Jew, and another short story collection, What Happened Behind the Wall, both of which are to be released at the Riyadh Book Fair in March.
Read more from the rest of the writers and mentors from at our friends at Publishing Perspectives.
Leave a Reply