The prestigious Man Booker International Prize was won by an Arabian writer for the first time. Jokha Alharthi, the writer from Oman has won the award for her work “Celestial Bodies”, the story of three sisters of a desert country confronting its slave-owning past and a complex modern world.
Jokha Alharthi, the first Arabic-language writer to take the prize, will split the 50,000 pounds or 64,000 US dollar purse with her UK-based translator, Marilyn Booth.
Historian Bettany Hughes, who led the judging panel, said that the winning novel was “a book to win over the head and the heart in equal measure.
“Celestial Bodies” beat five other finalists from Europe and South America, including last year’s winner, Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk. The prize is a counterpart to the Man Booker Prize for English-language novels and is open to books in any language that has been translated into English.
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