Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina shortlisted for Sheikh Zayed Book Award

26 / 02 / 2020

By Marwa Nassar -

Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina was shortlisted for the Publishing and Technology category of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (SZBA). L’Institut National des Langues et Civilizations Orientales in Paris, France and Banipal Magazine in London, UK were also shortlisted for the same category.

The Sheikh Zayed Book Award (SZBA) has revealed the shortlisted titles in the ‘Arab Culture in Other Languages’, ‘Translation’ and ‘Publishing and Technology’ categories for the 14th edition of the Award.

Other winners

The shortlist for the Arab Culture in Other Languages category comprises five works. Two are in German: Warum es kein islamisches Mittelalter gab: Das Erbe der Antike und der Orient (Why There Was No Islamic Middle Ages: The Legacy of Antiquity and the Orient) by Thomas Bauer, published by C.H. Beck Verlag, München, 2018, and 1001 Buch – Die Literaturen Des Orients (1001 Book – The Literatures of the Orient), by Stefan Weidner, published by Edition Converso, 2019.

One shortlisted title is in French, Nelly Amri’s Croire au Maghreb médiéval: La sainteté en question, XIVe-XVe siècle (Holiness and Eschatology in the Maghreb in the 14th and 15th Centuries) published by Les Editions du Cerf, 2019, joined by an English entry, The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings by Richard van Leeuwen, published by Brill Publishers, 2018.

Lastly, there is Sufi Network. Le confraternite islamiche tra globalizzazione e tradizione (Sufi Network: Islamic Brotherhoods Between Globalization and Tradition) in Italian, by Francesco Alfonso Leccese, published by Editoriale Jouvence, 2017.

In the Translation category, three works have been shortlisted; Al Manteqa Al Mo’atemah: Al Tareekh Al Seri Lelharb Alsebraniya (The Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War) by Fred Kaplan, translated from English to Arabic by Loay Abdel Mageed (National Council for Culture, Arts and Literature in Kuwait, 2019); Al-Insan Al-Romantiqi (L’Homme Romantique) by Georges Gusdorf, translated from French to Arabic by Mohamed Ait Mihoub (Dracher Sinatra/Tunis Institute for Translation, 2018); and Al Shokouk Ala Galen (Abū Bakr al-Rāzī Doutes sur Galien) by Abu Bakr Al-Razi, translated from Arabic to French by Pauline Koetschet (Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 2019).

The Arab Culture in Other Languages category received 82 entries this year, while the Translation and the Publishing and Technology categories received 170 and 39 entries respectively.

A total of 1,900 entries were submitted for the 14th edition of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award across its eight categories this year, with the Young Author and Literature categories receiving the highest number of nominations.

Winners of the 14th edition of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award will be honored on 16 April 2020 in conjunction with the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.

The winner of the Cultural Personality of the Year accolade receives a gold medal with the award logo and a certificate of merit and a prize of AED 1 million. Winners of other categories receive a gold medal, a certificate of merit and a prize of AED 750,000.