Palestinian prisoner Basem Khandaqji’s novel wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Abdul Rahman Saeed, Staff Reporter

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced on Sunday evening, that the novel “A Mask, the Colour of the Sky” by Palestinian prisoner Basem Khandaqji won the seventeenth session of the award.

Nabil Suleiman, Chairman of the Jury, revealed the name of the award-winning novel during an event organized in Abu Dhabi.

The jury chose the winning novel from among one hundred and thirty-three novels nominated for the award for this session as the best novel published between July 2022 and June 2023.

The novel’s publisher, Rana Idris, owner of Dar Al-Adab publishing house received the award on behalf of the writer Basem Khandaqji.

The mask is a reference to the “blue identity cars” that Nour, an archaeologist residing in a camp in Ramallah, finds in the pocket of an old coat whose owner is Israeli. Nour takes this card in an attempt to understand life behind the security fence, and thus the novel’s narrative journey begins. A multi-layered novel characterized by character building, experimentation, and retrieval of history and memory of places.

Nabil Suleiman, head of the jury, said: “In (A Mask, the Colour of the Sky) the personal merges with the political in innovative ways. A novel that ventures into experimenting with new narrative formulas for the great trilogy: self-consciousness, other-consciousness, and world-consciousness, where imagination spears dismantling the complex, bitter reality, family fragmentation, displacement, genocide, and racism. The strands of history and myth, the present and the contemporary also clashed and flourished in it, and the fervent human pulse against betrayal was kindled in it, as well as the desires for freedom and liberation from everything that distorts human beings, individuals and societies, were kindled in it. It is a novel that declares love and friendship as a human identity above all affiliations.”

Yasser Suleiman, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, said: “Basem Khandaqji’s novel “A Mask, the Colour of the Sky” wanders through worlds in which the present intersects with the past in attempts at revelation through which the ego collides with the other. They are both tormented on earth, but one of them is the victim of the other. In this relationship, the Palestinian Nakba becomes a memorial as an effect of a humanitarian catastrophe in which the victim has nothing to do.”

Imprisoned since 2004, Khandaqji has written poetry collections – including Rituals of the First Time (2010) and The Breath of a Nocturnal Poem (2013) – as well as three earlier novels, The Narcissus of Isolation (2017), The Eclipse of Badr al-Din (2019) and The Breath of a Woman Let Down (2020).

Alongside Khandaqji, the 2024 shortlist features novels by Raja Alem (Saudi Arabia), Rima Bali (Syria), Osama Al-Eissa (Palestine), Ahmed Al-Morsi (Egypt) and Eissa Nasiri (Morocco).

The panel of five judges was chaired by Syrian writer Nabil Suleiman. Joining him on the panel were Palestinian writer, researcher and academic Sonia Nimr, Czech academic František Ondráš, Egyptian critic and journalist Mohamed Shoair, and Sudanese writer and journalist Hammour Ziada.

The aim of IPAF is to reward excellence in contemporary Arabic creative writing and to encourage the readership of high-quality Arabic literature internationally through the translation and publication in other major languages of novels recognised by the prize (whether as winners, or on shortlists or longlists).