The Cultural Village Foundation, Katara, announced today that it has made amendments to the method of announcing the winners of the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction, so that prior to the announcement of the award, two lists of the best novels nominated for winning will be published during each cycle of the award. published, and will be published next June, and the second is a list of /9/ publications with the names of their authors, for each category of the award, and will be published next September, that is, one month before the official announcement of the winners of the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is held annually in the International Week of the Novel From 13 to 20 October every year.
Dr. Khaled bin Ibrahim Al-Sulaiti, Director General of the Cultural Village Foundation (Katara), said: "These amendments reinforce many demands received by the award committee requesting the announcement of nomination lists for the best works even if they did not achieve the first ranks, because merely entering them in the lists of the best works means that they are distinguished, and this is a certificate in itself from the screening and arbitration committees, that would award works that reach The latter lists are famous and contribute to the speed of publication if they are in the category of unpublished novels". Al-Sulaiti added that these amendments to the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction will come into force as of the current ninth edition of the prize 2023, which will also witness a great momentum that will last for a week in conjunction with the International Week of the Novel, which Katara celebrated for the first time last year 2022 at the UNESCO headquarters in the French capital, Paris. As the owner of the initiative of the International Week of the novel.
For his part, Mr. Khaled Abdel Rahim Al-Sayed, General Supervisor of the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction, confirmed that the celebration of the International Week of Fiction this year will be very special, given that it is held for the first time in the cultural neighborhood / Katara /, after the adoption of the International Week of Fiction by UNESCO in 2021 at the initiative of Katara, pointing out that the novel week will include a number of events, including signing ceremonies for the winning publications in the previous session, in addition to the novel and plastic art activity, theater and novel activity, in addition to celebrating the personality of the year, which is an annual tradition that takes place within the activities of the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction. Where the award committee chose the Egyptian writer and novelist Ihsan Abdel Quddous to be the Person of the Year 2023, and work is underway to develop the novel’s website to become an online portal specialized in the Arabic novel.
And the Public Foundation for the Cultural Village (Katara) announced that the number of participants in the Katara Prize for Arabic Fiction in its ninth session for the year 2023 reached 1491, and the number of unpublished novels participating in this session reached about 833 novels, while the number of published novels reached 393 novels published in 2023. 2022, and 191 entries in the category of unpublished novels for boys, and 68 entries in the category of unpublished studies, in addition to 6 Qatari novels published in the fifth category of the award.
