Shaqir wins the Palestine Prize for Literature for 2023

Dar Noufal Foundation, the imprint of the publisher Hachette Antoine, announced that the Jerusalemite writer Mahmoud Shuqair won the Palestine International Prize for Literature for the year 2023, for all of his works.

The Palestinian writer has published many novels and biographical books, including “The Family Horse” and “Praise for the Women of the Family,” which was shortlisted for the Arab Booker Prize in 2016, and “Those Places,” “Those Times,” and “Shadows of the Family.” .

In this regard, Mahmoud Shuqair said that he felt great joy and pride in this victory, which confirms that “Palestinian literature definitely exists, and that the Palestinian people exist and will continue to exist, and the forces of evil and aggression will not be able to erase them or dissipate their cause.”

When receiving the news of the win, Shuqair added, “This award comes at an appropriate time. It is an award affiliated with Palestine and seeks to present Palestine through literature to the world.”

Mahmoud Shuqair, who arrived in the capital, Jerusalem, in 1941, served as Vice President of the Jordanian Writers Association and a member of the Association’s governing body between 1977 and 1987. He was a member of the Palestinian National Council, and was editor-in-chief of many Arab newspapers and magazines.

The Palestine International Prize for Literature is a non-governmental award established in November 2019 by a number of intellectuals, academics and workers in cultural institutions in Morocco, in cooperation with cultural and literary unions in some Islamic countries, with the aim of defending the Palestinian cause and highlighting its human face to the world, by introducing literary books published in the world. On the issue of Palestine and the liberation of Jerusalem.

It is worth noting that this award selects a writer every two years to honor him for his entire work. Choucair was preceded in receiving this award by the writer Salma Al-Khadraa Al-Jayousi (2019), and the poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah (2021).