Including the Nobel to Egypt and Pulitzer for Libyan and poker for Omani .. Arabs share of the world literary awards

Imran Abdullah

Arab writers and writers did not win many international awards; while 29 writers in English won the Nobel Prize, 15 in French, and 11 in Spanish, Aldad's book came only once, as well as a single prize for the Pulitzer Prize and the British Booker Man.

However, many Arab writers have been nominated for international literary prizes, including the Nobel Prize, which nominated several Arab writers from Egypt, Syria and Morocco, while a number of Arab writers reached the long list of awards for this year 2019, including the US National Book Award and the Newstad International Prize For literature. "

Nobel sole winner
Only Egyptian writer and novelist Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature among the Arabic names nominated for the International Prize; novelist Tawfiq al-Hakim was nominated in the 1970s, while Taha Hussein was nominated in the late 1940s, and was the first Arab candidate in the history of the award. Confirming the nomination of writer Youssef Idris and writer Anis Mansour, but the data of the Swedish Academy, which revealed the names of the nominees for the Nobel Prize for Literature since its inception in 1901 until 1969, 50 years before the year of nomination for the prize does not show these names for sure.

According to the Nobel Prize archive, Dean of Arabic Literature Taha Hussein was nominated in 1949, 1950, 1952, and 1965. Hussein may have been nominated again in other years before his death in the 1970s, but has yet to be officially announced.

Syrian poet Ahmed Said Asber (Adonis) has also been repeatedly nominated, most recently in 2018, and Moroccan philosopher and novelist and poet Mohamed Aziz Hababi, who died in 1993, but there are no official assurances yet.

Naguib Mahfouz, known for his realistic literature, was awarded the prize in 1988 when he was 76, and as he walked to buy morning newspapers on his way to his office, he was surprised by the news of his Nobel Prize, which changed his life and earned him international fame. He provided great service to humanity through his literary works.

Single Pulitzer
In 2017, Libyan novelist and poet Hisham Matar won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Return, an autobiography of the author about his life, especially his return to Libya after 30 years abroad because of his father's dispute with the regime of the late Libyan Colonel Muammar. Gaddafi.

The director of the award, Mike Pride, announced that the novel, published by Random House, is a "lament to the homeland and the father with the conscience of the speaker, and examines the sentiments of the past and present in a crisis zone."

The Pulitzer Prize is one of the most prestigious international awards presented annually by Columbia University in the United States in the fields of literature, music and journalism.

Matar was born in 1970 in New York City to Libyan parents. He spent his childhood between Tripoli and Cairo. His first novel "In the Country of Men" in 2006 won six international awards and was translated into 28 languages.

His second novel, Anatomy of Disappearance, was named in 2011 among the best books of the year in the Guardian and Chicago Tribune polls.

Poker Man
Omani novelist Jokha Al Harthy has won the 2019 Man Booker Prize for her novel `` Ladies of the Moon '', which describes an important stage in the history of the Sultanate of Oman, becoming the first Arab figure to win this award, which was competed this year six works translated into English.

Gokha, 41, shared the 50,000-pound ($ 63.5,000) prize with the American Academy Marilyn Booth, who translated the novel from Arabic into English.

"The work has captured both hearts and minds and deserves reflection," said the historian and British writer Bethany Hughes, adding that the translation was also linguistically accurate and rich in her rhythm and poetry.

In a previous interview with Al Jazeera Net, Al-Harthy hoped that winning the award would be a source of hope for all Arab novelists, because Arab literature deserves and deserves to be read, know and trust the book themselves and the ability of their literature to compete globally, and stressed that it does not doubt that the Arab literature has moved to the world.

Other prizes
The American National Book Award was first founded in 1936 by the Union of American Booksellers, but it collapsed in World War II.It was re-launched in 1950, before the National Nonprofit Organization was founded in 1988 to sponsor the award. American literature, expanding its audience, and ensuring that books have a prominent place in American culture.

In the nominations of the translated literature category, Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa published the long list of final names for 2019 for his novel "Death is hard work," translated from Arabic by Leary Price, and tells the story of death in Syria, starting from the will of a father to his son transformed into a complete narrative world going on in wartime. No Arab work or Arabic translator has won the American prize before.

The list of finalists for the 2020 Newstad International Literature Prize included two Arabic names: Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifa for her novel "Cactus", which takes place in the West Bank, and tells the diary of a Palestinian family in Nablus and its suffering with the brutality of the occupation, and the famous Moroccan novelist Abdel Latif Allabi, who He also won the Francophone Grand Prize awarded by the French Academy in 2011.

The long list of the EBRD Literary Prize for 2019 included two Arabic works: 'My Name is Adam' by Elias Khoury from Humphrey Davies, and 'Shatila Stories', which includes nine stories collected following a writing workshop on the camp experience and the bloody massacre. The images "of Abdel Fattah Kilito are discounted to the list as a Moroccan narrative with French expression.

Lilas Taha's English-language novel, The Bitter Almond, by Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar, won the 2017 US International Book Award for the category "Multicultural Literary Works."