The winners of the 13th Sheikh Zayed Book Award are set to receive their prizes at a special ceremony at Louvre Abu Dhabi, held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces.
Taking place on Thursday 25 April and hosted by the Department of Culture and Tourism - Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi),
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is presented annually to outstanding writers, intellectuals, publishers and emerging talents whose writing and translation in the humanities field enriches Arab intellectual, cultural, literary and social life. This year, six international authors and an Arab research centre will be honoured for their exceptional literary and intellectual publications.
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 and Art Criticism’ category, scholar Dr. Charbel Dagher from Lebanon won the award for his book Contemporary Arabic Poetry - the prose (Al Maaref Forum, 2018). For 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 and Technology’.