ABU DHABI // Nine young writers who showed promise during this year’s International Prize for Arab Fiction (Ipaf) have returned from an eight-day workshop in Liwa, claiming that it had been a transformative experience.
The writers, who have all been published previously, were selected after they submitted works of fiction to Ipaf. For the workshop, entitled Nadwa, they stayed in the desert resort of Qasr Al Serab to concentrate on new projects and were mentored by three prestigious authors who gave them daily feedback.
Bahaa Taher, who won the inaugural Ipaf award in 2008 for his novel, Sunset Oasis, said that "by all standards of measurement, it was a successful workshop".
Taher, an Egyptian, has published 17 books and won several awards.
Ibrahim Nasrallah, a Jordanian-Palestinian and another mentor on the trip, said one of the most fruitful things about the workshop was the extent of the group’s participation and the variety of ideas.
“I feel lucky to have participated and I feel these authors will make a mark on Arabic literature in the future,” he said.
The third mentor, Khor Gourram, from Morocco, said that the desert location was crucial.
“The desert is linked with poetry and the novel came from the city, so this was a bold experiment to bring the novel to the desert and to open the dialogue with the poetry of the place. Although each person had different critical concerns, they all took something from their environment.”
The nine writers were from Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the UAE.
Sultan Al Ameemi, the only Emirati in the group, said he saw it as a chance to relearn everything he already knew.
“I wanted to learn the basics from zero, so I forgot I am already a published novelist and started fresh,” he said. “I am very pleased because I finally began my second novel during the workshop.”
Other participants were Suleiman Al Muamiri, an Omani who is the director of programming for Oman Radio, Sahla Ujayli, a Syrian writer who has published several critical studies, Dina Mohamed Abd Elsalam, an Egyptian who also makes short films, Emad Al Wardani, a short-story writer and researcher from Morocco, Taher Al Zahrani a Saudi journalist and author, Nassima Raoui, a Moroccan poet, Ahmed Salah Sabik, an Egyptian architect and graphic designer who recently started writing, and Majid Suleiman, a novelist from Saudi Arabia who has published three books.
Following the workshop all of the authors will return to their home countries to work on new projects.
aseaman@thenational.ae
