Minister honours winners of children’s literature award

HE the Minister of Culture and Sports Salah bin Ghanem bin Nasser al-Ali yesterday honoured the winners of the seventh edition of the State Award for Children’s Literature at the Doha International Book Fair at the Doha Exhibition and Convention Centre.
Five awards were given to the winners. Dr Mariam Abdulrahman al-Nuaimi from Qatar won in the Story category for her work The Silver Wave.
In the Children’s Books category, Mohamed Ali Abdullah Abel from Qatar won for his work Hedgehogs and Jerboa.
In the Literary Criticism category, Moroccan critic Yaseen Hecker and Algerian critic Rahmatallah Orissi won the awards.
In the category of Cartoon Films, the award went to Syrian Wassim Adnan Abdul Ghani.
The Minister of Culture and Sports also honoured the current and former board of trustees of the award in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the success of the award at the Arab level.
Member of the board of trustees of the award, Dr Rabia al-Kuwari, said that the Ministry of Culture and Sports bears the cultural responsibility to contribute to the formation of awareness of the Arab child in order to have a bright and safe future for all Arab countries.
The board of trustees of the award expressed its aspiration to achieve greater awareness of the value and character of the child not only at the level of writing, but also in various aspects related to the child’s culture.
This is what the award seeks through its interest by increasing the awareness of the Arab child of poetry, novel, cartoons, children’s stories, children’s music, children’s electronic games and smart phone applications in addition to the areas of the award at its seventh edition.
The Winners of the Award Speech was delivered by Dr Mariam al-Nuaimi, who stressed that the award is the culmination of the Arab children’s creativity, and said that Qatar is an incubator of Arab culture and thought based on its well-established principles that differentiate between political and cultural matters. She noted that the Ministry of Culture, by honouring of the winners from various Arab countries is reaffirming its support for the continuation of the process of creative work in the field of children’s culture and literature.
Director of the Department of Cultural Research and Studies and Secretary of the Award, Faleh bin Hussain al-Hajri, said in a press statements following the ceremony that the award is a creative work that adds to the literature of the Arab children.
Some 163 works were presented in the five categories. They are: 69 texts in the Theatre category, 81 works in the Story category, 5 works in the area of Children’s Books, 4 works in the field of Literary Criticism, and 4 in the field of Cartoon Films.