Ibrahim Nasrallah

Ibrahim Nasrallah the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in Amman-Jordan in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted in 1948 from their homeland. Nasrallah is a poet, novelist, painter, and photographer. To date, Nasrallah has published 14 poetry collections, 23 novels, and 2 film critic books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Tragicomedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one. 13 novels were published in the framework of this project, many of which were awarded the most prestigious literary awards in the Arab world. His works have been translated and published in English, Italian, Danish, Turkish, Spanish, Persian, and other languages. Nasrallah’s books are among the bestselling books in the Arab world, his work has attracted attention among critics and international academia with more than 14 literary critic books and 60 Ph.D. and Masters theses studying his work. His novel Prairies of Fever was chosen by the Guardian newspaper as one of the most important ten novels written by Arabs or non-Arabs about the Arab world. He won 11 prizes, the most recent in 2022 when he was awarded The Palestine Prize for Literature by The Palestine Prize Foundation in the USA. He received the Sultan Owais Literary Award for Poetry in 1997. His novel Time of White Horses was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction (Arabic Booker Prize) in 2009, and his novel The Second Dog War won the Arabic Booker Prize in 2018. In January 2014, he succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture that involved two Palestinian adolescents, a boy and a girl, who have lost their legs. The climb was in support of a nongovernmental organization dedicated to providing medical services to children. He wrote about this journey a novel entitled The Spirits of Kilimanjaro, which was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels (2016). In 2020, he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the Katara Prize for the second time for his novel “A Tank Under the Christmas Tree”.