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Rabat – On March 16, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award announced that the Moroccan author Bensalem Himmich won the literature award for his memoir “The Self: Between Existence and Creation.” The book was published by Book Cultural Centre for Publishing & Distribution, in 2018.
The book is an autobiography through which Himmich discusses the intellectual stances he adopted throughout his career as a novelist. Himmich emphasizes the connection between one’s existence and creation, the path that the person takes through struggles against cultural and existential matters.
Himmich is a former minister of culture and currently a novelist, poet, and philosopher who teaches at the Mohammed V University, in Rabat.
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is one of the best-funded prizes presented yearly to those whose writings and translations of humanities have scholarly and objectively enriched Arab cultural, literary and social life.
Himmich is a two-time winner of the Najib Mahfouz Prize as well as the recipient of several distinctions, including the Grand Atlas Award (2000), the Sharjah-UNESCO Prize (2003), and the silver medal of the academic society “Arts-Sciences-Letters.”
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The award ceremony of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award will take place on April 25, at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
The five other internationally renowned novelists are Kuwaiti author-photographer Hussain Al-mutawa who won the Children’s Literature award for “I Dream of Being a Cement Mixer,” Algerian scholar Dr. Abderrezak Belagrouz won the Young Author award for his academic work “The Essence of Values and the Freedom of Social Concepts.”
In the category of Literary and Art Criticism, Dr. Charbel Dagher won for his work of “Contemporary Arabic Poetry,” Philip F. Kennedy won for his work “Arabic Narrative Tradition” in the category of Arab Culture in Other Languages, finally, in the category of publishing and technology, the award went to the UAE’s Arab Centre for “Geographic Literature.”
The winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award are granted a gold medal, a certificate of merit, and MAD 750,000.
