The winner of the 2018 prize is set to be announced May 22 in London. Each year, the winning team’s £50,000 prize is divided equally between author and translator(s).
“As a literary critic and a writer with a disability, I found myself unable to remain silenced about the lack of representation of female diverse bodies.”
The finalists for both the fiction and poetry awards will be announced on Tuesday, May 15, with the winners set to be announced on Thursday, May 31.
There will be two awards: one for a debut work, and the other for an established author in the genre of speculative fiction. Each award winner will receive $5,000.
In “Good Morning, War,” my mother, who didn’t believe in her death, is the main narrator, speaking from the grave. The shock of my mother’s death, in which I also didn’t believe, and the shock of the fall of my country and its continued destruction, drove me write to hold on to our humanity, so that war victims don’t become numbers.
“This year, we’ll translate Ta’ al-khajal by Fadela Alfarouk and we will do the translation as a collective one (I’m convinced that collective knowledge production is always better than individual one).”
Raheem also wrote political and literary theory, but he believed in the role of the novel as a tool of cultural enlightenment; this was the subject of his final tweet.
“Submissions are welcome in either English or Arabic. Previously unpublished poets are encouraged to submit their work; however, we are looking for quality literary writing and writers who have a proper command of evocative language.”
“I would like to add that the book was written during Palestine Writing Workshop project. The project has a number of writers and illustrators, and each one works on their own project, but we’re all in one place helping to share ideas and thoughts. That helped me to bring Bolqosh to its final version, which is different from when I started with it.”
