First Arab Writer Wins One of the Biggest Literature Prizes – and She’s a Woman!

Jokha Alharthi, the first female Omani whose literary work has been translated into English, is also being praised as the first author writing in Arabic to be awarded with the Man Booker International Prize.

The Omani author achieved these two milestones thanks to her second of three novels, Celestial Bodies, which focuses on the stories of three sisters and their families dealing with social changes in Oman.

The novel touches on issues between the late 19^th century and the early 21^st, with characters including arms dealers, violent poets and enslaved women raising their owners’ children. “The style is a metaphor for the subject,” explains historian Bettany Hughes, head of the Booker judging panel, “subtly resisting clichés of race, slavery and gender.”