Ahdaf Soueif and the South African poet, Breyton Breytenbach, were announced yesterday as the winners of the Mahmoud Darwish Award.

The announcement was made by the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation at an official ceremony at the Ramallah Palace of Culture under the patronage of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Palestinian Premier, Salam Fayyad, spoke at the event, as did the Head of the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation, Yaser Abd Rabbo, and Palestinian Minister of Culture, Siham al-Barghouti.

Breytenbach was present. Soueif sent an acceptance speech that was read out at the ceremony.

The panel of judges who met in Amman on 22 January 2010 were the critics and writers: Faysal Darraj (Chair/Palestine), Jaber Asfur (Egypt), Khaled al-Kurki (Jordan), Subhi Hadidi (Syria), Hassan Khader, Ahmad Harb, Sulayman Jubran, Ibrahim Moussa and Ibrahim Abuhashhash (Palestine).

The panel unanimously agreed to award the prize to Egyptian novelist, Ahdaf Soueif and South African poet and artist, Breyton Breytenbach. The panel awarded each of the two authors the full prize independently rather than sharing the prize between them.

The citation for Ahdaf Soueif:

“The Committee for ‘The Mahmoud Darwish Award’, in its foundational meeting in Amman on 22 January 2010, with the full complement of its members, gives its first award to the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif. Soueif has - in her various writings, and particularly in her narrative fiction – spoken for the values of freedom, justice, national independence and mutual recognition between different peoples and cultures. She has worked from a position of cultural enlightenment and from a human sensitivity of many dimensions. She has combined the particular, which refers to an Arab cultural inheritance, with the universal, which is open to different cultures, rejecting both chauvinism and isolation, and confronting the culture of dominance and power with a human culture insisting on the equality of all humans in both rights and duties.

Ahdaf Soueif has expressed her cultural position - which meets monolithic positions with an insistence on a fertile human diversity – in innovative English prose interrogated by an implicit Arabic that has made a friend of the English  and empowered it to extend its expressive boundaries. Her work combines the virtues of knowledge and the wish to know: she knows what she writes about and what her bases are, but she also interrogates what she knows and gives it new significance, achieving a discourse of dialogue, bringing together the ‘I and the ‘other’ at the creative level and anticipating a human universe freed from its shackles.

Ahdaf Soueif has declared time and again her prioritization of values and of the human; she has insisted on writing as a creative human act that makes demands on behalf of mankind, translating into her own work the words of Mahmoud Darwish about “the absurdity of a self-sufficient art”.

In her novel, The Map of Love, Soueif traced the emergence of the Zionist project. And the Palestinian tragedy is the focus of her Mezzaterra, in which she uncovers for the English reader, with honesty and vision, the suffering of the Palestinian people under occupation. Its “Introduction” is a manifesto of her commitment to the causes of her Arab people.

Ahdaf Soueif is an intellectual of exceptional calibre, she acts as she speaks, and she practices what she writes; she has lived in one language and written in another, so creating a space for both languages and both cultures to meet. She has defended and continues to defend the ideals of Arab and Palestinian liberation and the liberation of the downtrodden wherever they are.  

For all this, we find her deserving of the Mahnmoud Darwish Award.