Four of this year’s winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, a cultural initiative supported by TCA Abu Dhabi, will make an appearance to discuss their work at this year’s book fair.
The prestigious prize, which is awarded to academic and creative endeavours in nine categories and welcomes submissions from writers, intellectuals, researchers and publishers, has been more hotly contested than ever, with a 12 per cent increase in submissions on last year.
The winners of seven out of the nine categories were announced at the beginning of this month and the Egyptian author Abdel Rasheed Mahmoudi scooped the Award for Literature for his novel After Coffee (Al Dar Al Arabiya for Books, 2013). Mahmoudi will be on the Discussion Sofa to talk about After Coffee, which is set in an Egyptian village in the 1940s, at 6.30pm on Friday.
There’s also the chance to listen to Jawdat Fakhr Eldine, winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature, and the winner of the Young Author category, Rami Abu Shehab, on the Discussion Sofa on Saturday at 4.45pm and 6pm respectively.
And finally, Mario Liverani, a professor of Ancient Near East History at the Sapienza University of Rome, won the Arabic Culture in Other Languages Award for his history Imagining Babylon (Laterza, 2013). The judges praised his work for eschewing accepted wisdom and the professor will talk about his research on the Discussion Sofa on Monday at 7.15pm.
cdight@thenational.ae
