Ibrahim Nasrallah has won the International prize for Arabic fiction with The Second War of the Dog, a novel hailed by the judges as “a masterful vision of a dystopian future in a nameless country”. Along with the $50,000 cheque – one of the richest prizes in fiction – Nasrallah has also been awarded funds for an English translation of the novel.
Announcing the winner, chair of judges Ibrahim Al Saafin praised The Second War of the Dog for its use of techniques drawn from fantasy and science fiction. “It exposes the tendency towards brutality inherent in society,” he said, “imagining a time where human and moral values have been discarded and anything is permissible, even the buying and selling of human souls.”
The novel focuses on Rashid, who transforms from an opponent of the unnamed regime into a materialistic and unscrupulous extremist. Nasrallah, the judges said, reveals the “intrinsic savagery” of human beings in a futuristic world where greed intensifies and human values and ethics are ignored.
Professor Yasir Suleiman, chair of the board of trustees for the prize, said the novel “paints a chilling picture of humanity in all its destructive potential”. He praised the author’s “crisp language in which humour makes the moral burden of relating to the main character bearable”.
Nasrallah is the author of four novels and volumes of poetry translated into English, including Time of White Horses, which was shortlisted for the 2009 International prize for Arabic fiction. Born in 1954 to Palestinian parents uprooted from their homeland in 1948, he spent his childhood in the Al-Wehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, before moving to Saudi Arabia to work as a teacher.
In a film made for the award ceremony in Abu Dhabi, Nasrallah called the novel a “warning of what we could become in the future”, adding that he wrote it to “provoke the reader, to worry the reader, to even, sometimes, make them breathless ... The novel suggests that if we continue on our current path, we will reach a future where we would become mostly annihilistic.”
The prize is awarded to the best work of fiction published in Arabic between July 2016 and June 2017. Five other books were shortlisted: Amir Tag Elsir’s Flowers in Flames; Aziz Mohammed’s The Critical Case of “K”; Shahad Al Rawi’s The Baghdad Clock; Walid Shurafa’s Heir of the Tombstones; and Dima Wannous’s The Frightened Ones. Each finalist received $10,000.
The prize was launched in 2007 to improve the international reach of Arabic fiction. This year Oneworld, which published Man Booker winners Paul Beatty and Marlon James, brought out an English version of the 2014 winner Ahmed Saasawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, a mixture of absurdist morality tale and horror fantasy. Translation rights for Saasawi’s novel, which was described in the Guardian as “hallucinatory and hilarious”, have been sold into a further 14 languages.
