Scientific Committee

HE Saeed Hamdan Al Tunaiji

HE Saeed Hamdan Al Tunaiji, Executive Director of the Arabic Language Centre, has acquired extensive experience in leading initiatives that focus on books and the publishing industry at the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi). He managed creative content and played a major role in publishing notable series of books, including with the Kalima Project for Translation and the ‘Isdarat’ series.

Juergen Boos

Juergen Boos became President and CEO of the Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH (Frankfurt Book Fair) in 2005 and is President of LITPROM (Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature) and Managing Director of LitCam (Frankfurter Buchmesse Literacy Campaign). On 20 November 2013, he was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art. In January 2017, Juergen Boos received an honorary degree from the Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. In February 2018, he was conferred the cultural distinction of “Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres“ (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) at the French embassy in Berlin. He holds a membership of the Scientific Committee of Sheikh Zayed Book Award and of Akademie Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize Academy).

Dr. Nadia El Cheikh

Nadia El Cheikh is a scholar of the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium. She earned her BA in History and Archaeology with distinction from the American University of Beirut in 1985 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1992. Her publications include Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (2004), Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court (2013), Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir (2013), and Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity (2015), published by Harvard University Press and recently translated into Arabic, among other studies. At the American University of Beirut, El Cheikh served as Director of the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology, before being appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at AUB, becoming the first woman to assume the post in the faculty’s history. In 2022, she was appointed Vice Provost for Cultural and Research Engagement at NYU Abu Dhabi.

Mustafa Al-Slaiman

Mustafa Al-Slaiman was born in Jordan, in 1960, and currently lives and works in Germany’s capital, Berlin, as a prolific literary translator, conference interpreter and cultural mediator.

Following the completion of his studies, Al-Slaiman went on to work as an interpretation and translation Lecturer at Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany, Faculty of Applied Linguistic and Cultural Sciences, Germersheim. He has also worked as a staff translator and interpreter at German’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with another role being Arabic language and culture tutor in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Passau in Germany. 

Al-Slaiman has translated many literary works from German into Arabic and vice-versa, including an anthology of poetry into German, and has had several articles and essays published by various literary periodicals and newspapers, as well as research papers in various languages. He has also organized readings and other literary events for adults, children and young people across Germany.

Dr. Reem Bassiouney

Dr. Reem Bassiouney is an Egyptian author, as well as a professor and chair of the linguistics department at the American University in Cairo since 2013. She previously worked as an assistant professor of linguistics at Georgetown University (2007-2013) and lecturer of linguistics at the University of Utah (2005-2007), in addition to teaching at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge (2002-2005), and serving as a member of the judging panels for the Excellence in Literature Award 2024 from the Supreme Council of Culture, as well as the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) in 2023. 

Dr. Bassiouney has a PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of Oxford (2002), a master’s degree in sociolinguistics from the University of Oxford (1998), and a bachelor’s degree in English from Alexandria University (1994). She has earned acclaim from notable critics in Egypt, other Arab countries, and around the world. Dr. Bassiouney has authored a collection of novels, which were all published in several editions. Most of her works topped the best-seller list and were translated by Dr. Roger Allen, who also worked on the novels of the great Naguib Mahfouz.

Mehmet Hakki Suçin

Mehmet Hakki Suçin is a Turkish academic, translator, and Arabist. He is the head of the Arabic Language Department at Gazi University in Ankara, Turkey. Suçin has a master’s degree in Arabic literature and a PhD in translation between Arabic and Turkish. He chaired the committee that developed the Arabic language curricula currently used in Turkey according to the The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In 2006, he travelled to the UK as a visiting professor at the University of Manchester. Suçin manages the annual literary translation workshops between Arabic and Turkish in Turkey and abroad. His published translations of classical and modern Arabic literature into Turkish, including but not limited to The Seven Suspended Odes (al-Mu’allaqat), Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi’s Diwan (Selections), Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, Ibn Hazm's The Ring of the Dove, as well as works by Gibran Khalil Gibran, Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Nizar Qabbani, Ghassan Kanafani, Naguib Mahfouz, Muhammad al-Maghut, Nouri al-Jarrah, Najwan Darwish, Adania Shibli, Ahmad al-Shahawi, Khulood Al-Mualla and others. His studies focus on Arabic literature, translation studies, teaching Arabic to non-native speakers, and creative drama.

Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer

Currently, Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer holds the UNESCO Chair in Translating Cultures at King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies.  Dr. Al-Ghadeer has held academic positions at prestigious American universities, including, the Arcapita Visiting Professor of comparative literature in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University and was a Shawwaf Visiting Professor at Harvard University. She was a tenured Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received several fellowships and awards along with a postdoctoral fellowship from Emory University. Dr. Al-Ghadeer received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work focuses on Arabic, African-American, and Francophone literature, philosophy, oral tradition, and translation studies.

Her book, Desert Voices: Bedouin Women’s Poetry in Saudi Arabia (I.B. Tauris/American University of Cairo Press, 2009), is the first English translation and theoretical analysis of Bedouin women’s oral poetry from Saudi Arabia. She has had articles, book chapters, and translations published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Columbia University Press, Bloomsbury Publishing, and Two Lines Press in addition to having her work published in journals such as the Journal of Arabic Literature, Michigan Quarterly Review, asymptote, and Arablit, among others. Recently, she completed the translation of five poetry collections by Badr Bin Abdulmohsin and her anthology, Translating the World: Contemporary Poems from Saudi Arabia is forthcoming. 

Dr. Khaled Al-Masri

Dr. Khaled Al-Masri is a university professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has worked as a professor at the University of Virginia and Harvard University, and as a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. His translations and research have been published in American and British journals. He has translated two books into English on the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque and oral history in the United Arab Emirates. His research focuses on the intersections of war, migration, and gender in modern Arabic short stories and novels.