Lebanese novelist Hassan Daoud, who was named on Saturday 12 December as the winner of the 2015 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, awarded by the American University in Cairo, will be hosted on Tuesday at 7pm at Merit Publishing House to discuss his novel La Tariq ila al-Janna (No Road to Heaven), which won him the medal.

The discussion will be run by writers Abdel-Hakam Soliman and the Lebanese Mohammed Abi-Samra, while writer Wael Abdel-Fattah will participate in the discussion.

In their citation for the award, the judging panel for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature described the book as "a marvelous psychological novel that penetrates the enigmas of time and man in a religious society. His evocation of a character enclosed in his existence in a southern Lebanese village is subtle and profound... The work's insights are Proustian in their precision. Each paragraph is like a wafer-thin cross section of reality, so simply presented that the problem and questions that each arise are exposed in all their complexity."

Daoud was born in 1950 in a village in southern Lebanon before moving with his family to Beirut. He studied Arabic literature and became a journalist during Lebanon's civil war, which broke out in 1975, writing for Al-Hayat newspaper. His other novels have been translated into English and French. He is currently the editorial director of Al-Modon cultural website.

His winning novel is his ninth novel, which was published in Beirut in 2013 by Dar al-Saqi.

Programme:

Tuesday, 15 Dec, at 7:00pm

Merit Publishing House

32 Sabry Abu Alam st. Talaat Harb, Cairo Downtown