British-Egyptian novelist Omar Hamilton wins Arabic Literature Award

CAIRO – 17 September 2018: “The City Always Wins”, written by British-Egyptian novelist Omar Robert Hamilton, won the Arabic Literature Award for the French version of the book, translated by Sarah Gurcel and published by prominent French publishing house, Gallimard.

The novel was praised by writer and head of L'Orient littéraire who described it as "a powerful first novel, perfectly mastered, which plunges us into Egypt at the time of the 2011 revolution and which paints moving portraits of young Egyptians engaged in their fight for freedom.”

The prize is awarded by Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, and is granted to Arabic literature translated into French. The prize was originally founded in 2013. Faber published the novel for the first time in English in 2017. The novel revolves around overthrowing Mubarak’s regime and the incidents that took place in Maspero in October 2011.

The Arabic version of "The City Always Wins" is set to be released soon.
Hamilton will receive his award on October 24, 2018 at 7 p.m. at the Arab World Institute. Jack Lang, president of the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and Pierre Leroy, managing director of the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation, will be present. The prize worth €10,000 was awarded to Lebanese novelist Jabbour el-Douaihy in 2013, Egyptian novelist Mohamed el-Fakharany in 2014, and Sinan Anton from Iraq in 2017.

Born in London in 1984, Hamilton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer holding dual British/Egyptian citizenship. He has written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Mada Masr and Guernica. He is a co-founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature and the Mosireen media collective in Cairo.