Sheikh Zayed Book Award receives over 800 nominations ahead of deadline in October

Abu Dhabi, August 22, 2016 – The Sheikh Zayed Book Award received over 881 nominations participating in its 11th session so far since the call for nominations back in mid-May of this year. ‘Young Author’ and ‘Literature’ are leading the rest of categories with the highest number of participations - 296 and 214 respectively - while ‘Best Contribution to the Development of Nations’ category followed with 113 works and ‘Literary Art and Criticism’ category with 97 works. Nominations came from more than 42 countries, mainly from the Arab world, including UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Qatar, Oman, Sudan; in addition to works from Spain, France, United Kingdom, Canada, Norway and Austria. The Sheikh Zayed Book Award is still accepting nominations until first of October 2016, to be followed by the reading panels’ work to filter out the nominations that are not compliant with the Award’s general regulations. With the wrap up of the reading panels’ work, the Sheikh Zayed Book Award’s judging panels will commence assessment and evaluation of filtered works. Each category has three judges who independently evaluate the nominations and submit their proposed long-list that is collectively evaluated by the Scientific Committee for the Award to produce the short listed titles. Consequently, the Board of trustees reviews the short-listed titles and selects the winners who are announced during the Abu Dhabi Int’l Book Fair. All nominated works must have been published in the last two years and shouldn’t be previously awarded by an international/ prominent Prize. The work must be written in Arabic, except for works nominated for the Translation Award (they could be translated either from or to Arabic), and the works nominated for ‘Arabic Culture in Other Languages’ which can be in English, German, Italian, French and Spanish Languages. More details on nomination process can be found on the Award’s website The Sheikh Zayed Book Award's first installment was in 2007, intended to promote scholarship and creativity in Arab culture.