Shortlist issued for ‘Arab Booker’

Karen Attwood

• Last Updated: December 11. 2008 9:30AM UAE / December 11. 2008 5:30AM GMT

ABU DHABI // The Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah and the Egyptian novelist Mohamed el Bisatie have made the shortlist of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which was announced yesterday.

The Iraqi-born author Inaam Kachachi is also among the six finalists.

The award, which has been called the Arab Booker, carries a first prize of US$50,000 (Dh183,500) and each author on the shortlist will receive $10,000.

Announcing the finalists at a ceremony at the Southbank Centre in London yesterday, Youmna el Eid, the Lebanese academic and the chairman of judges, said the titles were chosen “because they contain all the creative characteristics which make Arabic fiction unique”.

The prize was launched in Abu Dhabi last year in association with Britain’s Booker Prize Foundation and is funded by the Emirates Foundation, one of the UAE’s leading philanthropic organisations.

Nasrallah’s novel Time of White Horses charts three generations of a Palestinian family in a small village, while el Bisatie’s Hunger is an account of people at the bottom of society who suffer from continuous hunger. Both writers have been translated into English.

Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter depicts the American occupation of Iraq through the eyes of an American Iraqi woman who returns to her country as an interpreter for the US army.

The other finalists are the Syrian author Fawwaz Haddad whose book The Unfaithful Translator tells the story of a translator accused of betrayal due to his nonconformist views; and Al Habib al Salmi, the Tunisian author whose novel The Scents of Marie-Claire explores the cultural clash between East and West through the relationship between an Arab man and a western woman; and the Egyptian writer Yusuf Zaydan, whose Beelzebub is set in fifth-century Upper Egypt, Alexandria and northern Syria.

Ahmed Ali al Sayegh, the managing director of the Emirates Foundation, described the shortlist as “particularly noteworthy”.

“The Foundation is delighted to see this particularly noteworthy shortlist for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction after the competitive longlist issued by the judges last month,” he said.

The six novels that made last year’s inaugural shortlist had not been previously translated into English.

The prize was won by the Egyptian writer Baha Taher for his historical novel Sunset Oasis.

Sigrid Rausing, the Tetra Pak heiress who owns Granta and Portobello publishers, agreed to fund an English translation of the winning novel, which will be published in Britain next summer by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.

Joumana Haddad, the prize’s administrator, said: “The remarkable success of the 2008 shortlist, with many translation deals secured for all six authors, is yet another stimulus for IPAF to develop new ways to promote Arabic literature, and to provide its longlisted, shortlisted and winning writers with more publishing and publicity opportunities worldwide.”

The prize winner will be announced at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi on March 16, immediately before the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

Plans for the translation of the 2009 winner and shortlist are being discussed.

As well as Youma el Eid, the judging panel includes: Rasheed el-Enany, an Egyptian professor of modern Arabic literature and director of Arab Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter; Hartmut Fähndrich, a German translator of Arabic literature; the Emirati writer Mohammad al Murr; and Fakhri Saleh, a Jordanian critic and journalist.

The jury received 131 submissions from 15 countries, including 104 entries by male authors and 17 by women.



kattwood@thenational.ae