Staff Reporter
Muscat, Nov 27
The French Lagardere Foundation awarded Jokha al Harthi, an Omani writer and academic, its 2021 Prix de La Littérature Arabe, a French prize that celebrates literature by Arab authors written in French or literature translated from Arabic to French.
She won the 10,000 euros prize for her novel “Les corps célestes (Celestial Bodies)” translated from Arabic by Khaled Osman and published by Stéphane Marsan.
Jokha’s novel competed with seven other novels from Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, Mauritania and Palestine.
The prize was created in 2013 by the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and the Arab World Institute.
Harthi, 43, has previously won the British Man Booker Prize for the English translation of the same novel.
She received her PhD in the Classical literature from the University of Edinburgh. She is currently an associate professor at Sultan Qaboos University.
