The winners of the 20th Sheikh Zayed Book Award will be honoured on Wednesday at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, where a state-backed literary prize hands out Dh750,000 ($204,167) to each competitive category winner and Dh1 million ($272,222) to the Cultural Personality of the Year. The ceremony marks the 20th year of an award launched in 2006, a polished cultural machine that presents itself as a champion of Arabic literature, scholarship and exchange while sitting comfortably inside the patronage structures that make such prizes possible.
The Prize and the Patron
Ali bin Tamim, secretary general of both the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre and the award, said the 20th anniversary offers “an opportunity to reflect on how a cultural initiative has evolved into a leading platform for recognising rigorous scholarship, creative writing, and intellectual contribution across the Arab world and beyond.” He added that over two decades, the award has helped shape “a vibrant literary and research landscape, supporting authors, translators, and publishers while encouraging the highest academic and creative standards.” The language is grand. The money is concrete. The institution, meanwhile, decides which voices get amplified and which remain outside the velvet rope.
The award’s own list of 15 notable winning books, now available in English, stretches across fiction, children’s literature, poetry, translation and scholarship. That range matters. So does the structure behind it. A prize that can elevate a book, a career and a public reputation in one sweep is not a neutral literary mechanism; it is an apparatus for sorting prestige, distributing resources and defining what counts as serious culture.
Stories of Displacement, Conformity and Escape
Several of the winning books deal with people trapped inside systems they didn’t design. Palestinian-American writer Ibtisam Barakat won the Children's Literature Award in 2020 with The Lilac Girl, a story inspired by Palestinian artist Tamam Al-Akhal. Its young protagonist has been displaced from Jaffa and turns to painting to hold on to the home she remembers. The book explores memory, loss and displacement from a child’s perspective. That’s the human cost, stripped of ceremony.
Kuwaiti author Hussain Al Mutawaa won the Children's Literature award in 2019 for I Dream of Being a Concrete Mixer, in which a young protagonist wants to become a concrete mixer rather than follow the path expected of him. The book raises questions about ambition, choice and what adults expect of children. Al Mutawaa told The National that children's literature can work on more than one level: “The story is at the heart, and the bigger issues are on top of each other.”
Emirati writer Hessa Al Mehairi won the Children's Literature Award in 2018 for The Dinoraf, a picture book about a dinosaur looking for creatures like himself. He travels among different animals before finding a home among giraffes. Al Mehairi became the first Emirati woman to win the award. “Children's literature [stories] are often universal,” she told The National. “It is also a great way to share with people our different cultures and show what we have in common.” Kuwaiti author Lateefa Buti’s Hatless, winner of the Children's Literature award in 2017, imagines a city where everyone is born wearing a hat that covers their face. One girl removes hers. The story centres on curiosity, conformity and independent thought. Small rebellion, no flag required.
History, Translation and the Long Memory of Power
The prize also rewards work that digs through history’s debris. Algerian novelist Said Khatibi won the Young Author award in 2023 for The End of the Sahara, a crime novel set in the weeks leading up to the October 1988 riots that shook Algeria. The killing of a nightclub singer sits at the centre of the mystery, but the investigation moves through social division, political unease and the secrets of people living through a tense period in Algeria. Khatibi returned to a similar approach in Swimming Against the Tide, which won this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Beginning with a woman accused of poisoning her husband, the novel expands into half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence to the early 1990s.
Egyptian writer Abdelrashid Mahmoudi won the Literature award in 2014 for After Coffee, a novel about Medhat, an Egyptian man whose life unfolds between Ismailia and Vienna in the 1940s. Mahmoudi described him as “a bit of a loser and a failure.” The character drifts through relationships while struggling with love, disappointment and where he belongs. Mahmoudi mixes dark humour and melancholy with classical Arabic narrative, Egyptian dialect, poetry, proverbs, songs and verses from the Quran. “Our hero is torn between two women: an ideal woman he dreams of but can never get, and her sister who is available and he can get but doesn’t love,” he told The National. “The ending, in many ways, is a bit tragic, as we feel the confusion and the struggle of Medhat to do something right for once in his life, but does he? I leave that to you to decide.”
Qais Sedki became the first Emirati to win a Sheikh Zayed Book Award when Gold Ring received the Children's Literature prize in 2010. Inspired by Japanese manga but set within Emirati culture, the graphic novel follows 15-year-old Sultan and his falcon as they enter a fictional competition that tests their skill and perseverance. “The reason I set out to do this is to get children reading at a younger age, and to get them to associate something traditional with something cool, like manga,” Sedki said.
Scholarship, Memory and the Gatekeepers of Culture
Other winners turn scholarship into excavation. Egyptian poet and writer Iman Mersal explores the life and career of enigmatic Egyptian writer Enayat Al Zayyat in Traces of Enayat, her 2021 Literature category winner. Al Zayyat's only novel, Love and Silence, appeared in 1967, four years after her death. Mersal first encountered the novel in 1993 and became interested in why both the author and her work had largely disappeared from literary history. “It was important for me to tell Enayat’s story without making her representative of something, and without my speaking for her,” Mersal said. “I wanted her to emerge through my journey towards her. The decision to tell the story of researching Enayat opened up many possibilities. Enayat and her life became the engine of the book, but even as the narrative circles closer around the mystery of her life, other characters and stories, present and past, spring up around her.”
Lebanese poet Jawdat Fakhreddine won the Children's Literature award in 2015 for Thirty Poems for Children, a collection that moves from everyday childhood to the natural world and the imagination. The judges praised its “simplicity in language and beauty of rhythms,” along with its illustrations and the way the poems encourage children to observe the world around them. A prize panel, a set of criteria, a seal of approval. Culture, but with a ledger.
The translation winners show the same pattern of institutional selection. Iraqi-American food historian Nawal Nasrallah won the 2026 Translation award for Smorgasbords of Andalusi and Maghribi Dishes and Their Salutary Benefits, bringing a 13th-century Andalusi and Maghrebi cookbook into English. The surviving work contains recipes and preparations showing the ingredients, cooking methods and eating habits of the medieval Western Islamic world. Nasrallah’s edition also provides historical context and a glossary for some of the food, language and techniques in the manuscript.
Italian historian Marco Di Branco won the Translation award in 2025 for Orosius: Seven Books of Histories Against the Pagans, his work on the Arabic version of the fifth-century history written by Roman theologian Paulus Orosius. The book includes the surviving Arabic version, and an English translation and commentary explaining the text and how it came to circulate in Arabic during the medieval period. Michael Cooperson won the Translation award in 2021 for Impostures by Al-Hariri, a 12th-century work whose Maqamat follows the trickster Abu Zayd through 50 stories as he travels across the medieval Middle East, repeatedly relying on disguise, eloquence and deception to get what he wants. Cooperson said the challenge lies in Al-Hariri's language, which moves between rhymed prose, wordplay and different registers, so he gives each story a different English style rather than forcing them into a single voice.
Iraqi scholar Muhsin Al-Musawi won the Arab Culture in Other Languages award in 2022 for The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures, a study of how One Thousand and One Nights has been translated, adapted and reinterpreted around the world. The book traces the influence of the Nights across literature, cinema, theatre, painting, music and digital culture, while also examining how translators and editors have changed the stories over time. Italian historian Mario Liverani won the same award in 2014 for Imagining Babylon: The Modern Story of an Ancient City, which looks at how Babylon has been excavated, reconstructed and interpreted, and how those interpretations have changed over time. Liverani told The National that he wanted to examine “how western countries imagine the cities and towns of the Orient,” questioning assumptions built up around ancient Middle Eastern history. British writer and scholar Marina Warner won the award in 2013 for Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, a book on the role of magic in One Thousand and One Nights and the way its stories helped shape western literature and culture. Warner described her ability to turn around the rigorous scholarship as “effortless, almost addictive entertainment.”
That’s the whole machine in miniature: prestige, money, curation and the careful packaging of intellectual work for institutional consumption. The books are real. The authors are real. The prize is real too, with all the power that comes from deciding which stories get the spotlight and which ones stay in the shadows.