Lebanon’s Al-Daif awarded Mohamed Zafzaf Prize for Arabic Novel

ASSILAH – Lebanese novelist Rashid Al-Daif was awarded Saturday the “Mohamed Zafzaf Prize for Arabic Novel” at the International Cultural Moussem of Assilah.

The jury was chaired by the Moroccan critic Dr. Saeed Yaqtin, and its members included novelists and academics: Choukri Al-Mabkhout (Tunisia), Saeed Benkrad (Morocco), Katia Ghosn (Lebanon), Habib Abd al-Rab Souri (Yemen), Hassan Bahrawi (Morocco), in addition to Mohamed Benaissa, Secretary-General of the Assilah Forum Foundation.

Rashid Al-Daif's (1945) novelistic career began at the end of the seventies. He went through many narrative experiences, through which he entered memory, and approached the Lebanese war from the perspective of the disintegration of psychological awareness.

He moved towards the post-war novel, which took on an intimate nature, through which he expressed the thorny relationship between East and West, and the contradictions of male society and its various institutions.

He also wrote self-fiction and experimented with the fantasy novel, even if his stories were sometimes laced with traditional metaphors. This is because the concerns of what is happening in the complex geography called the “Arab World” of social confusion, intellectual and doctrinal polarity, physical strife, and a steady return to questions of the unseen, are nothing but another formula for a hidden war between the folds and edges, the extensions of which will soon rage amid flourishing factors of regression to conservatism and decline in the gains of the Renaissance.

The jury's attention was drawn to the critical boldness in Rashid Al-Daif's works that does not rewrite itself.

Contrary to the trend, he chose not to enter the novel from the perspective of major historical narratives, but he approached the art of the novel, the Arab heritage, modernity and what comes after it, and the fragmentation of the individual and society, by delving into the self of the Arab narrator/intellectual, and his contradictions, in an oblique manner, deliberately making light of it and not falling into it, and concealing whenever possible, and provide critical text backgrounds, with polished language and effective impact.

What is certain is that Rashid Al-Daif’s works, with their distinctive aesthetic and human visions in the course of the Arabic novel today, and in view of their artistic and intellectual value, have served Arab culture.