Sultan Al Owais Award for Lebanese novelist Alawiya Sobh

The Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Foundation announced on September 29 the list of winners for this year, including Lebanese novelist Alawiya Sobh who received the award for the category of ‘Short story, novel and drama’. Noting, that the award is in recognition for her unique style of employing intricate details of daily life to create a rich narrative world, and for her ability to intensify the Arabic language to express women’s concerns through meticulous selectiveness and recreating an independent and restructured narrative. Her characters reflected the general social setting, whereby their destinies and stories intertwine, with each character maintaining its own voice. In her comment to An Nahar daily, Sobh indicated that  she was pleased to get the award, albeit late. Sobh received her BA in Arabic Literature from the Lebanese University in 1978 and started prose writing and publishing when she was in her early twenties. The novels she wrote, particularly ‘Maryam al Hakaya’ and ‘Dunya’ in 2006 and ‘Ismuhu al Gharam’ in 2009, earned extensive positive critique. She also won the Sultan Qaboos Prize for Culture, Arts and Literature in 2006 and her novels were translated into French, German, Italian and English. (An Nahar, October 7, 2019)