The Palestinian writer Basel Khandaqji, who has been imprisoned in Israeli jails for nearly 20 years, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in its seventeenth edition for his novel "Mask the Color of the Sky," published by Dar Al-Adab. The prize, awarded by the Abu Dhabi Center for the Arabic Language with support from the Booker Foundation in London, has a monetary value of $50,000, in addition to a translation of the winning novel into English. The award was presented today, Sunday, on behalf of the winner by the novel’s publisher Rania Idris and his brother.
The shortlist announced in February included six novels from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Palestine, and Syria, with each receiving $10,000. Among the notable past winners of the prize, which began in April 2007, are Jordanian Jalal Barghouthi, Lebanese Huda Barakat, Palestinian Ibrahim Nasrallah, Iraqi Ahmed Saadawi, and Egyptian Bahaa Taher.
Basel Khandaqji is a Palestinian novelist born in Nablus in 1983. He studied journalism and media at An-Najah National University in Nablus. He wrote short stories until his arrest in 2004 when he was 21 years old. He completed his university education from inside prison through correspondence with Al-Quds University, where his thesis was on Israeli studies in political science. He also continued writing while in prison, producing numerous literary and political articles about Palestinian women who fought for their cause, the prisoners’ movement in Israeli jails, as well as several poetry collections and novels, including: "Rituals of the First Time" (2010); "Breath of a Night Poem" (2013); "Narcissus of Isolation" (2017); "The Eclipse of Badr al-Din" (2019); "Breath of a Betrayed Woman" (2020); and "Mask the Color of the Sky" (2023). Khandaqji dedicated his winning novel to "my uncle Khalid... my principled old companion... and to my aunt Nadia, daughter of the strong Yasmina neighborhood."
