>>On Sunday I went to the International Prize For Arabic Fiction event at Manchester Literature Festival. At which I learned that it’s not considered very PC to call it the Arabic Booker, but nevermind. The National did, so I am! Anyway, it was really good to see the festival following up the Beirut39 event last year with another look into the state of writing in Arabic. It wasn’t so well attended as last year, but we’ll put that down to a certain Manchester derby being held at exactly the same time.
The general thrust from chatting to previous judges Paul Starkey and Ghalia Kabbani, and previous winner Raja Alem was that IPAF has fulfilled most of its aims, in terms of raising the international profile of Arabic fiction, but there is still a long way to go before the translated books actually break through into the mainstream. It would be lovely, for example, if we didn’t have to wait until 2013 to read Alem’s winning book from earlier this year in English. The longlist for next year’s prize is announced next month.
“There’s a dynamism around creativity and literature that just hasn’t been seen for decades. The scene felt stagnant, and that might have been because people felt they lost their dignity within the political system, their power to change. But when Ipaf is receiving more than 130 submissions from publishing houses every year, I think that reflects a real shift in the importance of Arab novel writing.”
Click here to read the full IPAF feature in The National
