Ibrahim Nasrallah

Ibrahim Nasrallah, the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were evicted from their land in Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 21 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 12 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, four works in Italian, and one novel in Danish, Turkish, and Persian.

His novel The Second Dog War was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arabic Booker) for 2018.

In January 2014, he succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture that involved two Palestinian adolescents, a boy and a girl, who have lost their legs. The climb was in support to a nongovernmental organization dedicated to providing medical services to Palestinian and Arab children. Nasrallah wrote about this journey in a novel entitled The Spirits of Kilimanjaro (2015). In 2016, Nasrallah was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels for this work.

Nasrallah is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He won nine prizes, and his novel Prairies of Fever was chosen by the Guardian newspaper as one of the most important ten novels written by Arabs or non-Arabs about the Arab world. Three of his novels were listed on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for the years 2009, 2013, and 2014. In 2012 he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. Nasrallah is considered one of the most read writers in the Arab world.

In June 2006, Nasrallah's fourth collection of poetry "Nu’man Yastariddu Lawnahu" (Anemone Regains Its Colour) first published in 1984, was suddenly banned in Jordan, while Nasrallah faced charges of insulting the state, inciting dissension and reporting inaccurate information to future generations.

Nasrallah is a regular contributor to several to the main newspapers in the Arab World. He is also a painter and photographer. He has contributed to several exhibitions and had his own photography shows entitled “The Autobiography of an Eye” in 1996, and “Under Two Suns :Images and Words” in 2004, "The Life of the Dead Sea" a participation at the fifth Gwangju Biennale – South Korea 2004. Many academic theses handled his poetry and novels. The following dealt exclusively with his works: Nasrallah also had poetry reading at several cultural centers in metropolitan cities such as Paris, Rome, Venice, Frankfurt, Berlin, and cities in England Denmark, Switzerland and the United States of America ...., not to mention numerous literary activities in almost all Arabic capitals. Nasrallah also gave lectures and poetry readings at many of the local Jordanian universities as well Arabs and European universities.