Ten Moroccan authors took awards home from the Prix du Maroc du Livre ceremony that took place last Friday, October 18 at the National Library in Rabat:
Awards were given in seven categories, including: poetry, prose, children’s literature, and translation and went overwhelmingly to male writers.
Winners in the poetry category were Mustapha Melh, for his Arabic-language collection لا أوبِّخ أحداً (I Blame Nobody), and Rachid Khaless, for his French-language book Guerre totale suivie de vols, l’éclat.
The Arabic-language prose award went to Abderrahim Jiran for his novel الحجر والبركة (The Stone and the Blessing), while Moulaid El Adnani earned the Tamazight award for her Inadin n oudan (The Recall of Nights).
Mohamed Said Soussan took the children literature prize for حورية من السماء (A Fairy From the Sky).
There was also a translation award, which went to Hassan Taleb for a French to Arabic translation of Le proche et le lointain, un siècle d’anthropologie au Maroc by Hassan Rachik; a social sciences award jointly won by Ayad Ablal and Khalid Zakri, one for a book on religion and the other on “Arab modernities”; and a literature-studies award that went to Ibrahim al-Hussein for a book on caricature in Morocco.
The jury was reportedly made up of Moroccan academics from different fields. They had a total of 191 nominated titles that they considered before choosing the ten winners.
