The Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2018 winners were announced with Tunisian Néji Elounelli, Moroccan Mohammad Mishbal, Egyptian Ahmad Al Qarmalawi featuring.
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the most prestigious and well-funded prizes in the Arab World; it is in fact one of the richest prizes in the world. It is presented yearly to Arab writers, intellectuals, publishers as well as young talent whose writings and translations of humanities have scholarly and objectively enriched Arab cultural, literary and social life.
The categories handed out are Cultural Personality of the Year, Children’s Literature, Young Author, Contribution to the Development of Nations, Translation, Literature, Literary and Art Criticism, Arab Culture in Other Languages, and Publishing and Technology. Previous winners of the award include Ibrahim Abdelmeguid, Abbas Beydoun, Osama Alaysa, and Abdel Rasheed Mahmoudi.
The winners for the most current edition of the awards were announced earlier today and there are folks with African passports going home with the prize money of around $200,000 each. The three are;
Egyptian author Ahmad Al Qarmalawi who won the ‘Young Author’ category for his novel Amtar Sayfiyyah (Summer Rains), published by Maktabat al-Dar al-Arabiyah lil-Kitab, Cairo (2017).
Tunisia’s Néji Elounelli who won the ‘Translation’ Award for his Arabic translation from the work of German author Theodor W. Adorno, Natharayya ‘Astiteeqyya (Ästhetische Theorie), published by Al-Jamal Publications, Beirut (2017).
Moroccan academic Mohammad Mishbal who won the ‘Literary and Art Criticism’ Award for his work, Fi Balaghat Al Hajjaj: nahwa balagha hajjajiyyah litahleel al khitab (The Rhetoric of Al Hajjaj: Towards a rhetoric inspired by Al Hajjaj in analyzing discourse), published by Kunouz Al Ma’refa Publishers, Amman (2017).
They will be given their award at an elaborate ceremony on April 30, 2018.
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