World Literary Awards

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Sheikh Zayed Book Award

Edition 19 (2025)

Sheikh Zayed Award for ArtsSheikh Zayed Award for Best Technology in the Cultural FieldSheikh Zayed Award for Children's LiteratureSheikh Zayed Award for Cultural Personality of the YearSheikh Zayed Award for Development and State BuildingSheikh Zayed Award for LiteratureSheikh Zayed Award for Manuscript EditingSheikh Zayed Award for Publishing and DistributionSheikh Zayed Award for TranslationSheikh Zayed Award for Young AuthorPublishing and TechnologyLiterary and Art CriticismArabic Culture in Other LanguagesPublishing and Distribution

Winners

8 people
Haruki Murakami むらかみ はるき Winner
Hoda Barakat Winner
Hind or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (Dar Aladab, 2024)

The novel follows Hanadi, whose appearance changes after acromegaly, and the mother who cannot reconcile herself to her daughter, tracing rejection and attachment across Beirut and Paris. It reflects on beauty norms, self-image, and the unsettling drift between memory and exile.

A change in appearance quietly unravels family memory and self-image.

328 pages
beauty normsalienationmother and daughterillness and the bodymemoryexile
Latifa Labsir Winner

Seen through Hiba's eyes, the novel follows her autistic brother Raji's way of experiencing the world and the misunderstandings that arise at home and at school. It emphasizes empathy, imagination, and the need to understand difference with care.

Through an older sister's voice, her younger brother's world slowly comes into focus.

144 pages
autismfamilyschool lifeempathychildren and young adultsunderstanding difference

This scholarly study examines the spread of Arabic literary culture in early modern Southeast Asia through manuscripts and other little-studied texts. It brings into focus intellectual exchange with the Middle East, the development of Islam and Sufism, and the relationship between Arabic and Malay literary traditions.

Manuscript fragments are used to rethink the reach of Arabic culture across Southeast Asia.

536 pages
Arabic literary cultureSoutheast Asiamanuscript studiesIslamic historySufismintellectual exchange

This critical edition and translation revisits the Arabic version of Orosius's history through English translation and commentary. It shows how a Latin historical work was reworked in the Arabic and Islamic world, and how classical knowledge was received and transformed there.

It traces how a Latin classic was reimagined in the Arabic world.

1644 pages
classical receptiontranslationArabic manuscriptsLatin historiographyal-Andaluscomparative literature

This annotated critical edition revisits the rare work attributed to Usama ibn Munqidh and re-evaluates the traditions and records it preserves about women. It restores the text as a source of literary and historical value.

It rereads fragile records of women through careful scholarly editing.

700 pages
women's historytextual editingArabic literaturemanuscript studiessocial historysource criticism
Mohamed Bashari Achievement Award

Drawing on Islamic jurisprudence and social experience, the book asks how a Muslim woman's labor and contribution to family wealth should be recognized. It organizes contemporary debate around economic justice within the family and its legal grounding.

It reconsiders, through law and ethics, how women's labor supports family wealth.

552 pages
Muslim women's rightsIslamic jurisprudencefamily wealtheconomic justicesocial reformgender
Said Laouadi Winner
Food and Language: Cultural Excavations in Arab Heritage (Afrique Orient, 2023)

The book reads the relationship between food and rhetoric in Arab heritage across poetry, proverbs, and stories. It shows how dining, food vocabulary, and literary expression are bound together in cultural imagination.

It explores how the language of the table has woven Arab cultural memory.

295 pages
rhetoricfood cultureArab heritageliterary criticismproverbspoetry