Mohammed Hasan Alwan | |
Birth Date: | 1979 8, df=y |
Birth Place: | Riyadh, Saudi Arabia |
Nationality: | Saudi Arabian |
Genre: | Novels, short stories |
Mohammed Hasan Alwan (born 27 August 1979) is a Saudi Arabian novelist.[1] He was born in Riyadh and studied Computer Information Systems at King Saud University, obtaining a bachelor's degree in 2002. He also obtained an MBA from the University of Portland, Oregon in 2008 and Ph.D from Carleton University, Ottawa in 2016.[2]
Alwan has published five novels to date: Saqf Elkefaya (2002), Sophia (2004), Touq Altahara (2007), "Al-Qundus" (2011), and "Mouton Sageer" (2016). His work has appeared in translation in Banipal magazine ("Blonde Grass" and "Statistics", translated by Ali Azeriah); in The Guardian ("Oil Field", translated by Peter Clark);[3] and in Words Without Borders ("Mukhtar", translated by William M. Hutchins).[4]
His work was published in the Beirut39 anthology (Beirut39: New Writing from the Arab World, edited by Samuel Shimon) and in the IPAF Nadwa anthology (Emerging Arab Voices, edited by Peter Clark).
In 2009-10, Alwan was chosen as one of the 39 best Arab authors under the age of 40 by the Beirut39 project. He was also a participant in the first IPAF Nadwa in 2009.
In 2013, his novel, Al-Qundus, was shortlisted in the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2013).[5] In 2015, Alwan won the Arab World Institute's Prix de la Littérature Arabe for Al-Qundus, translated to French by Stéphanie Dujols as Le castor.[6] It was considered the best novel to be translated into French in 2015.[7] In 2017, he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for A Small Death, a novel about Ibn Arabi.[8]