The 13th edition of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award has announced the winners for 2018/19, with five international authors and an Arab research centre honoured for their exceptional literary and intellectual publications.
The Award is presented annually to outstanding writers, intellectuals and publishers, as well as emerging talents whose writing and translation in the humanities field enriches Arab intellectual, cultural, literary and social life.
Moroccan writer and novelist Bensalem Himmich’s autobiography The Self – Between Existence and Creation (Le Centre Culturel Du Livre, 2018) won the “Literature” category award, while author Hussain Almutawaa from Kuwait won the “Children’s Literature” category award for his novel I Dream of Being a Concrete Mixer (Al Hadaek Group, 2018). Algerian scholar Dr. Abderrezak Belagrouz won the “Young Author” category for his book The Essence of Values and the Freedom of Social Concepts, (The Arabian Establishment for Thought and Innovation, 2017). In the “Literary & Art Criticism” category, scholar Dr. Charbel Dagher from Lebanon won the award for his book Contemporary Arabic Poetry – the prose (Al Maaref Forum, 2018).
In the Arab Culture in Other Languages category, British academic and researcher Philip F. Kennedy won the award for his book Recognition in the Arabic Narrative Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), while the UAE’s Arab Centre for Geographic Literature – Irtiyad al-Afaq won the award category “Publishing & Technology”.
A ceremony to honour this year’s winners will be held on 25 April 2019, at The Plaza Auditorium of Louvre Abu Dhabi. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award ‘Cultural Personality of the Year’ will be named and announced soon, with the winner receiving an inscribed gold medal, a certificate of merit, and a 1 million-dirhams monetary award. Winners in the other categories will receive a gold medal, a certificate of merit, and a monetary award of 750 thousand-dirhams.