The award was first launched in 2008 and is currently sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Center for Arabic Language of the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism, and is supported by the Booker Foundation in London.
124 novels were nominated for this session’s prize, 16 of which made it to the long list in January, then only 6 for the short list in early March.
Each shortlisted novel received $10,000, while the winning novel received an additional $50,000 with its English translation.
The events of the novel “Al Qafar’s Alienation” take place in an Omani village and tell the story of Salem bin Abdullah, one of the water trackers, who are used by the villages in their search for underground water sources, whose extremities were linked to all the accidents of his family members caused by water, while he found himself trapped in the An aflaj canal “irrigation system” to survive.
The statements of the president of the jury, the Moroccan writer and novelist Mohamed Al-Ashari, during a ceremony held on Sunday to announce the prize:
• “The novel focused on a new subject in modern novel writing, which is the subject of water, in its relationship to the natural environment and human life in difficult areas.”
• “The writer has presented this subject through a continuous harmony between reality and myth, and he does so by constructing a transparent tight and poetic narrative language, and by sculpting exciting characters who occupy a fundamental role in the lives of people and at the same time arouse in them aversion and fear.”
• “The writer has been able to bring us closer to an unfamiliar theater for the novel disseminated in the Arab world, which is the theater of the valleys and aflaj in Amman, and the influence of natural elements on the relationship of man to its environment and culture.”
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