Egypt has announced its highest state-sponsored awards in the fields of art, literature and social sciences for 2016, with medals and cash prizes distributed to the nation's top achievers. The list of winners was announced on Sunday night after members of the Supreme Council for Culture (SCC) voted in an annual meeting in Cairo. The Nile Award – the highest honour – was handed to three influential figures: film director Ali Badrakhan (Arts); the late critic and Andalusian studies specialist El-Taher Makki (Literature); and Sabry El-Shabrawi, Associate Professor of Management at the American University in cairo (Social Sciences). In addition to their gold medals, each winner will receive EGP 400,000. Appreciation Awards went to nine people, along with the prize money of EGP 200,000 each: Zakaria Anany, Mostafa Damarany, and Nabil Abdel-Hamid (Literature); Samir Khafag, Ahmed Shiha, and Sabry Mansour (Arts); former culture minister Shaker Abdel-Hamid, late Islamic philosophy professor Mosfata Labib and Mohamed Riad (Social Sciences). There were six recipients of the Excellency Awards: writer Gar El-Naby El-Helw (Literature); cinematographer Tarek El-Telmissany and visual artist Sohair Othman (Arts); and Mohamed Shuman, Mona Hagga and Nabil Luka Bebawy (Social Sciences). The Excellency Award is worth, 100,000 EGP and a silver Medal. The SCC members select the winners from a list presented by cultural institutions several months before the vote. The prizes are granted in the fields of social science, the arts and literature and are distributed across four divisions: the Encouragement Award, the Excellency Award, the Appreciation Award and the Nile Award, which is the highest honor.
