Winners of 2019 Prix du Maroc du Livre in French, Arabic, Tamazight

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.