(MENAFN - Emirates News Agency (WAM)) ABU DHABI, 14th February, 2021 (WAM) The Sheikh Zayed Book Award (SZBA) at the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, held the first event of its 2021 cultural programme, a collaboration with New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) titled ‘Stories We Continue to Tell: The Many Returns of One Thousand and One Nights .
Hosted by the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi (DCT Abu Dhabi), the virtual seminar focussed on why this collection of Middle Eastern folktales has been such an inspiration to storytellers around the world since the 18th century.
The special seminar featured two previous SZBA laureates in the Arabic Culture in Other Languages category: Richard van Leeuwen, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Amsterdam, who won in 2020; and Philip Kennedy, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Comparative Literature at NYUAD, winner of the award in 2019. The seminar was moderated by Maya Kesrouany, Assistan
Centuries of fascination for ‘The One Thousand and One Nights’ were examined by two winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award this weekend, touching on contemporary interpretation and challenges.
A detail from the cover of Richard van Leeuwen’s ‘The Thousand and One Nights and Twentieth-Century Fiction: Intertextual Readings.’ Image: Brill
‘Part of the DNA of Western Literature’
The two most recent winners of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Arabic Culture in Other Languages category on Sunday (February 7) talked about the singular place of
The Thousand and One Nights in literature and wider culture.
On hand was Richard van Leeuwen, a senior lecturer in Islamic studies at the University of Amsterdam and author of several books on