St. Alban’s College and Banipal magazine have announced that Sudanese author Hammour Ziada has won the 2019 Banipal Visiting Writer Fellowship:
Ziada, an author and journalist, has published several works of fiction, including the short-story collections A Life Story from Omdurman (2008) and Foot of the Mountain (2014), and the novels Al-Kunj and The Longing of the Dervish (2014), which won him the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2014 and a spot on the longlist of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. It’s since been translated by Jonathan Wright.
The annual fellowship was established in October 2016 by St Aidan’s College of the University of Durham and Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature, with the support of the British Council. It supports a published author writing in Arabic for one academic term based at St Aidan’s College.
Ziada is the third fellow.
According to organizers, “The Fellowship encourages dialogue with the Arab world through literature. The cultural exchange and dialogue that it will enable, and create, will open windows for non-Arab audiences in the UK onto the realities of Arab cultures in all their diversity and vibrancy, enabling fruitful discourse to develop. It is hoped that this will lead to further exchange, to mutual respect, to new writings, to deeper understanding, and to contributing to Arab literature taking its rightful place in the canon of world literature.”
Ziada will arrive in Durham to start his residency in January 2019. Throughout, he will have the opportunity to “engage in a monthly literary activity with writers and readers in Durham, the North East of England, and London, in addition to pursuing his work-in-progress.”
Previous fellows were Libyan writer Najwa Binshatwan and Iraqi author Ali Bader. More at the Banipal website.
