Category Archives: Tunisia Literature

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North Africans pepper International Prize for Arabic Fiction longlist

Hammour Ziada

The International prize for Arabic fiction was set up in 2007 to address limited international availability of Arabic literature. The prize is one of the richest in writing in this part of the world as US$50,000 goes to the winner of the prize and shortlisted writers go home with US$10,000. The winner also gets translated into English so that English speakers like myself get to read them.

The organisers of the prize announced the longlist for the 2015 prize which had 16 books with 12 different countries listed. In that list of longlistees are Africans the first of which this blogger noted was Sudan’s Hammour Ziada who won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature 2014. There other writers include Muna al-Sheemi and Ashraf al-Khamaisi from Egypt, Shukri al-Mabkhout from Tunisia and Ahmed al-Madeeni and Mohammed Berrada from Morocco

The shortlist, where folks know that they will at least be going home with US$10,000 will be made in Casablanca, Morocco on Friday 13 February and the big winner will be announced in Abu Dhabi on 6 May. The full longlist includes;