For the second year in a row, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (SZBA) judges have declined to grant a literature prize, stating that this year’s “nominations did not meet the Award’s standards and criteria for winning.” This despite a 14-strong literature longlist that included Mohamed al-Bisatie’s 2011 novel “And Their Bed is Green” and Ibrahim Nasrallah’s poetry collection “A Ray of Light Between Two Nights.”
The Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, now in its fifth year, released its schedule yesterday for the March 5-9 event, set to be held at the InterContinental in Dubai Festival City. Tickets are now on sale to “Festival Friends.” Headline… Read More ›
Today is opening day for The Archive (@TheArchiveDubai) a new library and meet-up space in Dubai. In a recent piece in The National, Egyptian novelist Nasser Iraq “Extols the Literary Potential of Dubai,” telling the newspaper that “there is a great opportunity for… Read More ›
Noura Noman’s debut science fiction novel, Ajwan, was just released this past week at the Sharjah International Book Fair at a packed event.
Images courtesy of a mystery photographer and the Twitter feed of @ShjIntlBookFair:
This is old news, since the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES) book award ceremony took place on Halloween (October 31 for you non-revelers) but I only just saw it: At the London ceremony, The Nabati Poetry of the… Read More ›
International publishers are meeting in Sharjah again this year, the thirty-first year of its international book fair, although only the fourth in its new guise as one of the world’s important trade fairs. The Sharjah fair — in some ways… Read More ›
Rüdiger Wischenbart Content & Consulting — together with Lebanese publisher Nasser Jarrous — just released a report on the publishing landscape in the UAE:
BBC recently “podcast” (can I use that as a verb?) Khalid Albudoor’s poem “Everything,” as read by Khawla al-Hawi. Listen or read: Everything Everything is in place Your mirror Your gem stones The burning oil pot The henna pot For… Read More ›
To not consider translated literature for our catalog would be ignorant…and arrogant for that matter.
Sharjah has set themselves the mission of becoming “the premier reading festival for children in the region.” It’s hard to think of any children’s reading festival that competes: Cairo closed its children’s book festival — ostensibly “merging” it with the… Read More ›
The Emirates may be better-known globally as “that country with the ATM that dispenses gold,” but they’re also deploying a new sort of machine in the malls–vending machines with books.
