30 January 2008
BEIRUT: Six writers from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt have been shortlisted for the first annual International Prize for Arabic Fiction, jury chief Samuel Shimon announced Tuesday during a news conference in London at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
The jury, whose six members were also revealed for the first time on Tuesday, selected Lebanese novelists Jabbour Douaihy and May Menassa, Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, Jordanian novelist Elias Farkouh and Egyptian novelists Mekkaoui Said and Baha Taher from an entry pool of 131 writers from 18 countries. The shortlisted writers win $10,000 each, and are now in the running for the final $50,000 prize, which will be announced during an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi on March 10.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is funded by the government-owned but administratively and financially independent Emirates Foundation in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is also known as the Arabic Booker due to its association with the UK's Booker Prize Foundation.
The 40-year-old Booker Prize is awarded annually to a full-length novel written by a citizen of the British Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. It is widely considered the most important - and, worth nearly $100,000 a pop, the most lucrative - literary prize in the English-speaking world. Past winners include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Arundhati Roy, Ben Okri, V.S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, J.M. Coetzee, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood and Iris Murdoch.
The Arabic Booker is the latest in an onslaught of arts and culture initiatives being launched on what seems like a daily basis in Abu Dhabi. It is also the latest in an onslaught of partnerships between the booming emirate and institutions that already exist elsewhere - such as the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim, the Abu Dhabi Louvre and the art fair Art Paris Abu Dhabi, a trend for which the emirate has been roundly criticized, suggesting a lack of originality and a tendency to buy rather than build prestige.
But Joumana Haddad, the Beirut-based poet and journalist who serves as the prize's administrator, offered a measured interpretation of this phenomenon on Sunday, speaking in her office in the An-Nahar building (she has been the newspaper's cultural editor for three years and on staff for 11).
"On the one hand," Haddad said, "why complain? People are motivated now for certain reasons that we will not discuss - they might be right or they might wrong - to improve the lives of writers. Writers in this part of the world cannot live from their books. Very few can live from the rights to their books. They all have to have other jobs and they can't concentrate exclusively on their writing. So why complain?
"On the other hand, we must complain," she added, to insure that such literary prizes are non-biased and based on merit.
"I really hope the Arabic Booker will make a difference," Haddad said. "I would like for it to be a more honest example of a literary prize, based on non-biased choices. I would like for it to be part of the promotion of Arabic contemporary literature abroad. So few writers have the chance to make it beyond the borders of their own countries," she said, to say nothing of making an impact across or even beyond the Arab world. "And I would like for it to give [the books] a chance for translation.
"Most of [the Arabic fiction that] is being translated now is only deepening the cliches," she explained, "and concretizing the exoticism of the Arab world instead of showing it as it is. You know what I mean, the 'Not Without My Daughter' style. I think Arabic contemporary literature should be able to survive in the world without these stereotypes."
The draw of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and the benefit it earns from its association with the Book Prize Foundation, is the likelihood that the winning titles will be translated into English and other European languages.
According to promotional material about the prize released late last week, a number of American and European publishing houses have already expressed interest in buying the foreign-language rights to the winning works.
The Arabic Booker is open to full-length novels originally written in Arabic and published within the previous year (it was two years for the inaugural prize). Submissions can only be made by publishers, who are limited to three entries a year (though publishers can recommend an additional three titles, just in case the entry pool is lackluster). Only one novel per writer can be fielded for consideration, and the writer must be living at the time of the award.
The prize is overseen by a 12-member board of trustees, including Margaret Obank (co-founder and editor of the literary journal Banipal), the Beirut-based publisher Riad al-Rayyes, Omar Saif Ghobash (one of the three partners behind Dubai's top-notch contemporary art gallery the Third Line, and the funder responsible for the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Literary Translation), Farouk Mardam-Bey of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and Jonathan Taylor, CEO of the Booker Prize Foundation, among others.
The board of trustees is responsible for recruiting the judges, who this year include Moroccan critics Mohammed Bennis and Mohammed Berrada, Palestinian writer and critic Feissal Darraj, Syrian journalist Ghalia Kabbani, British writer and translator Paul Starkey and jury chief Samuel Shimon, an Iraqi-born, London-based poet and novelist of Assyrian descent (who co-founded Banipal with his partner Obank 10 years ago).
There is one statistic about this year's submissions that is troubling but not especially surprising: 78 percent were novels by men and only 22 percent were novels by women, which is reflected in a shortlist boasting only one female writer.
May Menassa is in the running for her book "Walking in the Dust," which is published by Riad al-Rayyes. The sister of poet Venus Khoury-Ghata, Menassa is an art critic for An-Nahar and an established cultural figure in Beirut.
Though the prize is committed to discovering "new" writers and marginalized voices, the jury hasn't quite translated new as young. Most of the short-listed authors were born in the 1930s and 1940s. But at least one of the selections is daring. Khaled Khalifa's "In Praise of Hate," published by Amisa, is set in Syria in 1982 amid the army's brutal and comprehensive shelling of Hama, where members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups were agitating against Hafez Assad's rule. The novel is banned in Syria.
Rounding out the shortlist, Jabbour Douaihy is nominated for "June Rain," published by Dar an-Nahar; Elias Farkouh for "The Land of Purgatory," published by Al-Mouassassa; Mekkaoui Said for "Swan Song," published by Al-Dar; and Baha Taher for "Sunset Oasis," published by Al-Shorooq.
For more information on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, please check out
Copyright The Daily Star 2008.
