THE TOP WINNER of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), dubbed the "Arabic Booker Prize" since it is modeled on Britain's Man Booker Prize, was announced in Abu Dhabi on Monday. Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher was named the first winner of the US$60,000 Prize for his novel Sunset Oasis, published in Cairo by Al-Shorouq. The IPAF was officially launched in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in April 2007 in association with the Booker Prize Foundation and with the support of the Emirates Foundation. On 29 January this year, a shortlist of six novels was announced at a press conference in London. Besides Sunset Oasis, the other five shortlisted novels were Swan Song by Egyptian writer Mekkaoui Said, June Rain and Walking in the Dust by Lebanese writers Jabbour Douaihy and May Menassa, Land of Purgatory by Jordan's Elias Farkouh and In Praise of Hate by Syria's Khaled Khalifa. The Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Prize, Jonathan Taylor, who also chairs the Booker Prize Foundation, said in January that he hoped that the IPAF would "achieve the reputation and success of the Booker Prize itself," adding that "we shall hope to carry the influence of new Arabic literature all over the world, in Arabic as well as in translation." The judges for this year's prize, chaired by Iraqi author and journalist Samuel Shimon, include Moroccan writer and critic Mohammed Berrada, Moroccan poet Mohammed Bennis, Palestinian critic Feissal Darraj, Syrian writer and journalist Ghalia Kabbani and British academic Paul Starkey. Set in the late 19th century a few years after the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, Sunset Oasis tells the story of an Egyptian police officer who is punished by his British superiors for his sympathy with the nationalist revolution that took place shortly before the occupation. In an interview with the Weekly on the occasion of the nomination of Sunset Oasis for the Prize, Taher explained that his choice of the genre of the historical novel had been a conscious one that served a political purpose. "I wanted to deal with western domination in our part of the world," he said. "I was very much dismayed by the recent occupation of Iraq. We have gone back to classical colonialism, and that made me want to look back at the history of Egypt under occupation [...] When I finished writing [my novel] Love in Exile back in the 1990s, I believed it was my final testimony on contemporary Arab politics. However, I later discovered that I needed to write a second testimony, and I would like to think that Sunset Oasis is, among other things, a fulfillment of that need." The awarding of the IPAF on Monday coincides with the opening of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which began yesterday. As one writer commented in the British Financial Times newspaper on Tuesday, "this once-sleepy exhibition is now the region's fastest-growing fair. It aims to breathe life into a lacklustre Gulf publishing industry that has traditionally revolved around hagiographies of sheikhs."
