Mohammed Afifi, head of the SCC inaugurating the forum
Cairo's Sixth International Forum for the Arabic Novel was launched on Sunday 15 March after a five-year hiatus, with participation of 200 writers, critics and novelists from across the Arab world, and critics from USA, Italy, Britain and France. This year's edition is in honor of the late Egyptian writer Fathy Ghanem.
The forum was inaugurated at the small hall of Cairo Opera House, with keynote speeches from Egyptian critic Salah Fadl, Moroccan novelist Mohammed Barrada, and the head of the Supreme Council for Culture, the organiser of the forum, Mohammed Afifi.
Historian Zebeida Atta delivered the speech of Fathy Ghanem's family on their behalf.
The forum, which is held this year between 15 and 18 March, under the title "The Transformations and Aesthetics of the Novelistic Form," will grant a LE200,000 ($26,000) prize on its closure. This term's prize was doubled from LE100,000.
Late Saudi novelist Abdel-Rahman Munif, Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, late Sudanese novelist Tayyeb Saleh, Egyptian writer Edward El-Kharrat, and Libyan writer Ibrahim El-Kouny won the prize in previous terms.
Minister of Culture Abdel-Wahed El-Nabawe was absent from the inauguration due to attending the economic conference in Sharm El-Sheikh.
Critic Salah Fadl said that Egypt had two setbacks in the modern history, the first was in 1967, when Egypt's Army was defeated in the Six Day war, that left a deep wound in the psyches of Egyptian Intellectuals, and the other one was when the Muslim Brotherhood tried to "steal the Egyptian Revolution."
The renowned critic said that enlightenment, however, has never ceased in Egypt and the Arab World.
Fathy Ghanem's family thanked the state represented by the ministry of culture, and Egypt's book organisation, that reprinted his works, for commemorating the memory of Ghanem, saying the speech that Ghanem's real passion was literature, though journalism consumed most of his time.
"The novelist doesn't die, he is alive in his novels, as long as there are those who read and appreciate the value of his words, Fathy is still alive in the pages of his novels. Though he took many leading posts in journalism, as a CEO of Al-Gomhouria newspaper, or at the Middle East News Agency and as an editor in chief at two other newspapers, literature was his real passion, and his novels depicted the social transformations, and predicted the terrorism wave during the Sadat era," his family said.
Moroccan novelist Mohammed Barrada pointed out in his speech that novels are always tied to their present time and can't jump over it as it is always tied to the questions raised by the present time even if it chose to depict a past time.
"For this I think we are all here today as Arab novelists to have a dialogue and review the achievements of the Arabic novel in the past five years, that were full of the questions about the present of Arab societies, a present that is blazed with bloody conflicts, and burning questions of the divisions and civil wars and the domination of repressive regimes that puts a brake on freedom and any possibility of change," he said.
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