As part of “looking back” at the past twenty years of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award and Arabic literary production, BULAQ asked authors three questions. Here are excerpts from their answers.
Could you tell us what receiving the SZBA award was like for you? What consequences did it have? Did it give your work a new visibility; did it allow you to work differently; did it lead you to pursue new projects? Or something else entirely?
Ibtisam Barakat (winner of the children’s literature category, 2020)
Ibtisam Barakat is a Palestinian-American bilingual author, translator, poet, artist, and educator. Ibtisam answered in voicenotes. They were edited slightly for clarity.
It was one of the best things that happened along my creative journey. It happened during the pandemic when everyone was isolating and we were unable to go outside, so everything happened online. The award’s ceremony was seen by 2.2 million viewers in 24 hours. That was really shocking. And I’m certain many million millions saw it after that.
I’m an international author in English, and my books are taught in schools, colleges, universities around the world. But the Sheikh Zayed Book Award put huge attention on my writing in Arabic, which is the right thing because my mother tongue is Arabic, and it is my first love. So it was a kind of a going home in a sense. And for a Palestinian, it’s a big deal to go home in any sense.
I continued to write. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award truly encouraged and affirmed this decision. And writing is a very difficult path. It includes a lot of uncertainties and requires intense patience and not knowing. I mean, we write books that take years without knowing whether the book would be published or will be read, or will be finished. So it’s an act of spirituality, I mean, and requires a lot of spiritual strength to write a book, any book.
So it encouraged me a lot. And a few months ago, in 2025, my most recent book The Hidden Gate of Jerusalem, which is also in Arabic, won the International Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, that was announced during the Sharjah International Book Fair. And it was hailed as a masterpiece and I’m beyond thrilled. It also won a White Raven Award for being one of the best children’s books in the world. The White Raven is about selecting books from many languages in the world and in many countries. And Hidden Gate of Jerusalem is on this list. So I’m very, very grateful.
I’m grateful to contribute toward the healing of the Palestinian and Arab and international young people. The suffering targeting Palestinian children in particular is astonishingly cruel. And one of the top goals of my career has been to make the world aware of what happens in a Palestinian childhood. I started with the memoir Tasting of the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood, and I continue to work on that path. I would like to do something exceptionally beautiful, inspiring, healing, very healing for the children of Gaza and I most certainly will do that. It will happen. It’s fully intended on my part.
Maria Dadouch (winner of the children’s literature category, 2022)
Maria Dadouch is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter, and children’s book author. She has won a number of international awards, including the Katara Prize, the Choman Prize, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award, the Khalifa Educational Award, and the Arab Publishers Forum Prize. She won the SZBA children’s literature category in 2022 for her middle-grade novel The Mystery of the Glass Ball; her I Want Golden Eyes (winner of the Choman Prize) is as yet her only book available in English translation.
Receiving the Sheikh Zayed Book Award changed my life, not only because of the prestige of the award, but because it gave my work a level of visibility that is difficult to achieve through publication alone. Suddenly, my book was being discussed by readers, translators, and cultural institutions in a much wider context.
The award also created a sense of responsibility. I immediately asked myself: what will I do next? It made me more ambitious about future projects, encouraged me to take more risks, and also made me more selective about the work I choose to pursue.
Said Khatibi (winner of the young author category, 2023)
Saïd Khatibi is a novelist, travel writer, translator, and journalist born in 1984 in Bou Saâda, Algeria. He currently lives in Slovenia. He writes in Arabic and French and translates between both. His novel Sarajevo Firewood, was shortlisted for the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. His other novels are The Book of Errors which was published in 2013, and Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle, which won the 2017 Katara Award for Arabic Novels. He has written a travel book about the Balkans, The Inflamed Gardens of the East, 2015, and has written extensively on raï music, including the book Wedding Fire, 2010. His novel The End of the Sahara won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award Young Author category in 2023, and his Against the Tide won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2026.
My publisher, Hachette Antoine, had entered the novel for the award, and after that I almost forgot about it. The book was first selected for the longlist and then the shortlist. When it finally won, I thought that was the end of the story.
However, the real journey of the SZBA begins after winning it. The award opens the door to translations into other languages, and gave my novel greater visibility in the Arab world and abroad. I have met journalists and critics across Europe. I have also received invitations from several European universities. Such a strong reputation increases a writer’s sense of responsibility toward their work.
Marina Warner (winner of the Arab Culture in Non-Arabic Languages category, 2013)
Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales.She was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. After primary schools in Cairo and Brussels, she was educated in England at St Mary’s Convent, Ascot, and then read French and Italian as an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow.
Being awarded the prize was a very unexpected mark of esteem and it deepened my engagement with Arabic culture and its reception in Europe and America . It made it possible for me t pursue reading and research into the intersection of Arabic culture and Orientalism. I was concerned, in Stranger Magic, with drawing an alternative account of attitudes to the Middle East in the light of political and social tensions, which have not gone away of course. With Wen-Chin Ouyang at SOAS, in collaboration with Birkbeck College, my university, I convened a series of seminars on Arabic literature and translation for PhD students and anyone interested. We invited writers and translators to speak and read, and had a marvelous sequence of inspiring sessions: with Yasmine Seale, James Montgomery, Tamim al-Barghouti, Yusuf Qasmiyeh, Hoda Barakat, Huzama Habayeb, Selma Dabbagh, and others. It ran for two or even three years and was ended by the pandemic.
It inspired Selma Dabbagh to create her terrific anthology, We Wrote in Symbols, which was rightly enthusiastically received and unfolds a vigorous and powerful perspective on women in the Middle East. It also, to my knowledge, influenced two literature PhD students at Birkbeck: Pauline Suwanban and Eleanor Myerson, and the latter’s wonderfully rich book is out I think and worth reading: The Desire for Syria in Medieval England.
As for my own work, I became enthralled by the lives and poetry of the Consorts of the Caliphs after I wrote the foreword to the Library of Arabic Literature’s collection. It inspired a ballet project; I devised the libretto around certain figures and poems, but we never managed to stage it. The ballet was to be called Rawaa, after the word for watering and for narrating, as Philip Kennedy had told me.
The association became key to my later project, Stories In Transit, a series of workshops with asylum seekers in Sicily and my recent book, Sanctuary, which takes up several themes in Stranger Magic. Also, winning the prize bought me time and gave me space to write about my childhood in Cairo, in Inventory of a Life Mislaid: an Unreliable Memoir.
Hooda Shawa (winner of the children’s literature category in 2008)
Hooda Shawa is a Palestinian–British author of children’s and young adult literature. She received the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Children’s Literature in 2008 for The Birds’ Journey to Mount Qaf, the Kuwait Children’s Literature Award in 2017 for The Elephant’s Journey, and the Arab Children’s Book Publishers Forum award in 2023 for The Puppeteer. Her recent work includes the graphic novel Banat ‘Ad, co-written with Laila Qaddumi and illustrated by Ashraf Ghori; the graphic novel Gilgamesh’s Skull, illustrated by Michael Jabareen and excerpted in ArabLit Quarterly’s Gaza! Gaza! Gaza! issue; and The Donkey who Carried the War on her Back, which was selected for 2025 White Ravens List. Hooda is the founder of TAQA Productions, a production company that produces theater and puppet shows in Kuwait, where she lives.
On this milestone twentieth anniversary of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (SZBA), I find myself returning to a phone call in 2008, the one that brought the joyful news that my book, The Birds’ Journey to Mount Qaf, had won the Children’s Literature category. I had written it as a personal passion project, never imagining it would receive the acclaim it did.
The Birds’ Journey to Mount Qaf was, at its heart, a mystical metaphor for personal transformation, a journey activated by the appearance of a single magical feather from the elusive Simurgh, a mythical bird that lives on Mount Qaf. In many ways, I still believe in the magic of that feather; it enamored me for a career in Arabic writing, content creation, and producing theatre and drama. Looking back, the award itself became the lucky, magical feather of my own story.
SZBA was created in 2006, as part of efforts to promote Arabic literature internationally, foster cross-cultural understanding, and support knowledge production. How has the Arabic literary landscape changed since then – for writers, publishers or translators? What would you say has been a significant shift or development in the last 20 years?
Ibtisam Barakat
The Arabic literary landscape is much better now because of the internet, social media, self publishing, each person having, you know, the room to express with their own voice or express themselves, you know, whatever they want to publish. Social media, you know, has created a, a new world, so we do have a more vibrant scene. Yet the real struggles have not been tackled. This includes copyright infringement in the Arab world, inability to reach readers across the Arab world due to political and military barriers, also the numbers of committed readers or committed libraries that buy books.
I recently heard an interview, it was in 2026, this year, with a major publisher in the Arab world, Ibrahim El Moallem of Dar al-Shorouk, and he said that a print run will include 1000 books. And then they see if they sell. Now that’s for 500,000,000 people in the Arab world. A thousand copies for 500,000,000 people in the Arab world.
Let’s say 200,000,000 are grown ups. So we’re talking about 1000 copies of a book for two hundred thousand potential readers. I mean, that’s extremely alarming. And they’re not even certain that they’re going to sell 1000 books. So this is urgent and must be addressed.
Maria Dadouch
Since the Sheikh Zayed Book Award was created in 2006, the Arabic literary landscape has changed in many important ways. One of the most significant shifts has been the growing international visibility of Arabic literature. There is now greater attention to translation and cross-cultural publishing. We should also remember that the Sheikh Zayed Book Award offers generous translation grants, which encourage publishers to pursue outstanding Arabic books and introduce them to wider audiences.
Said Khatibi
I believe that Arabic literature now has a clear presence on the international stage. Twenty years ago, very few Arabic novels were translated into other languages.
Hooda Shawa
When I began writing for children in 2005, it felt like an act of defiance — a small stand in what seemed like a losing battle against the “globalized international school syndrome.” My two daughters were voracious readers, but voracious readers of English: they came home from their bilingual school with assigned fiction by Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson, and nothing at all in Arabic.
As a parent, I sensed something structurally wrong in this — a quiet, systematic erasure of Arabic cultural heritage, their heritage. Arabic creative content was considered difficult, boring and irrelevant. I responded the only way I knew how: by persevering to write in Arabic, in an environment where parents, educators, and publishers alike were quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, championing the merits of English instead. I kept searching for what I couldn’t find on the shelf: engaging, witty, culturally rooted Arabic children’s and YA books, eloquently written and beautifully produced.
Twenty years on, the children’s literature landscape has undergone a seismic shift. I remain in awe of the new releases each year, across every genre — especially in YA, which has become bolder, more adventurous, and genuinely a force to be reckoned with. For that shift to happen, publishers had to be willing to invest in Middle Grade and YA fiction as a viable category with a genuine demand. I believe the endurance of literary awards like the SZBA, as a pioneering Arab initiative operating at the frontier of Arabic-language education, creative content, and cultural production, has been instrumental in making that investment in high-quality Arabic story telling worthwhile to publishers and educational institutions alike.
What do you think has been the impact of literary awards such as the SZBA? And what else remains to be done? What do you think is most urgent or important to help support Arab writers, translators and publishers today?
Ibtisam Barakat
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award has created a wonderful motivation for writers to produce great literature in many categories. That is one of the amazingly beautiful elements about this award, that it has many categories to encourage writers for many genres. This includes children’s literature as well, and this is a pioneering spirit.
The Nobel Prize, for example, does not have children’s literature under the genres. They have poetry, fiction, short story, etc. But children’s literature, when it is real and embodies what it should embody, it is far more difficult than any other literary genre.
The huge number of frivolous children’s books that we see around the world get published is because the genre is extremely difficult, and the reader, that is to say the child, is the most honest literary critic that humanity will ever know. The child is the human before she or he learns how to mask the real responses and patronize and praise, etc, what, you know, the child leaves a book that they are not interested in. The child is a very honest critic.
The child is imaginative, the child is a genius, the genius of humanity is really in the child. And to write for the child, one has to write on a level that is extremely imaginative, concise, sensitive, thoughtful, lyrical. The best children’s stories are not many in many cultures, and we need many, many more. We need people to invest in children’s literature and to encourage it, to teach it, etc. And this is just the starting point.
In the past, people told stories to everyone, not just children, and children listened with everybody else and learned whatever they learned, and stories stayed with them. And that’s a beautiful way of doing stories, but now with targeting children with stories, it has to really be on the level of the genius of the child.
To help Arab writers, translators, and publishers, the Arab world itself has to change in fundamental ways — that’s my opinion. Fortunately, it is doing that in some respects. So the change is happening, but what needs to change is huge. The challenges include ending the wars that create barriers in front of people, books,writers, publishers, interactions, book fairs, sales, travel, studies. These wars have to stop. They’re extremely destructive to the book and to reading and to every element of life, and they continue, sadly.
Most importantly, barriers for attention, of the human who needs attention in order to sit with a book and to read. People living through wars and conflicts and wondering if something bad is going to happen today or tomorrow and not sure cannot really focus on reading books about the past or the future; they’re concerned with now. So really, ending the wars is going to help everything, especially reading and publishing.
Also, the economic situation: a book needs to be purchased, needs a budget. If a family is going to purchase books for children, for the grownups, to feed the mind, it’s like feeding the body, there’s a budget, and the economic hardships are also barriers in the Arab world.
Additionally, there’s a need for stopping the censorship on publishers and writers, freedom of speech on issues that matter deeply to the Arab reader, yet writers are not allowed to address these issues compared to what happens in the English language, for example.
And the most fundamental problem is illiteracy, of course. The wars create illiteracy, they destroy schools, they destroy the path of education, they kill teachers, they kill learners. So the rates of illiteracy are very high in the Arab world, and literacy and reading go hand in hand. As well, the educational systems in many Arab countries are not uniform with a vision to produce an Arabic-language thinker and reader. We need such unified vision for a reading and critically thinking Arab world.
Maria Dadouch
Literary awards such as the Sheikh Zayed Book Award give serious attention to writing, translation, scholarship, children’s literature, and publishing as essential parts of cultural development. They have also helped create standards of excellence that many writers and publishers now aspire to meet, and this has become a real engine of improvement in the book industry.
But there is still much to be done. The most urgent need today is to strengthen the ecosystem around Arabic books, not only to celebrate finished works. We need more affordable books, stronger support for the publishing industry, grants for school libraries, fairer contracts for writers and illustrators, and, most importantly, greater investment in marketing and distribution.
One of the things I deeply appreciate about the Sheikh Zayed Book Award is that it treats children’s literature as a central cultural field, not a secondary one, giving it the same seriousness, attention, and recognition as other literary categories.
My hope is for Arabic books to be visible not only during moments of celebration, but also in everyday reading life — in homes, schools, libraries, bookstores, and across languages.
Said Khatibi
I hope the SZBA continues to support young writers and new and creative experiments in Arab literature. We must think about the future of Arab literature and keep supporting real literary work, because readers are now overwhelmed by too much mediocrity, sentimental novels, and mass-market bestsellers. The SZBA can be a home for new writers. It would also be wonderful to create a Sheikh Zayed Academy of Literature, a place where writers can learn, grow, and develop their skills.
Hooda Shawa
Looking forward, I see the future goals of SZBA is to continue consolidating the efforts already underway between cultural and language institutions and education authorities, to more effectively link content production to educational goals. Every child should be aware of titles, authors and books from the wonderful pool of contemporary children’s literature that are recognized and celebrated by SZBA, as well as other prestigious Arab literary awards each year across the different categories of Arabic children’s literature.
If the SZBA’s first twenty years were defined by recognizing excellence in Arabic children’s and YA writing, I believe the next chapter is defined by further incorporating and channeling creative Arabic content directly into classrooms.These are exciting times, and I am proud to be part of this magical journey!