RAMALLAH, West Bank — By winning the 2018 International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF) with his dystopian novel “The Second War of the Dog” on April 24, Palestinian author Ibrahim Nasrallah has reasserted the presence of the Palestinian novel in the Arab literary scene. Nasrallah and three other Palestinian writers had been nominated for the Arab world’s top literary award, demonstrating the variety of emerging fiction writers of Palestinian origin.
Nasrallah already enjoys literary fame at home and abroad. Several of his 13 novels — most of which are historical — have been translated to English and other languages. He has also published 14 collections of poetry and two children’s books. Born in 1954 in the Wihdat refugee camp in Jordan, he studied in schools run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and worked as a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s. Nasrallah has also acted as director of cultural activities at Darat al Funun, which is a home for the arts and artists from the Arab world and is part of Amman's Khalid Shoman Foundation, of which Nasrallah is vice president.
The Jordanian-Palestinian writer was previously nominated for the IPAF twice. One nomination was in 2008 for “Time of White Horses,” which follows several generations in a village under Ottoman, British and Israeli rule.
Ironically, the novel that finally took the prize on April 24, the eve of the Abu Dubai International Book Fair, was unlike any of his other works, which cover Palestine's past and present. “The Second War of the Dog,” a 340-page novel published by Arab Scientific Publishers, takes place in an unnamed country in a dystopian future. It focuses on human savagery through the radical transformation of its antihero Rashid from an opponent of the regime to a corrupt extremist after he befriends a security officer, a die-hard opportunist who uses the system to achieve his own interests. While it takes place in the future, the allusion to the current reality of war, murder, repression and atmosphere of fear is all too clear.
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