Fiction
Travels of the City of Clay Trilogy
by Saud Alsanousi
Description
An intricately crafted fictional trilogy, with all three to be abridged into one volume for outside the Arabic world.
It’s 1986 and the novelist Sadiq Bouhadab is suffering from writer’s block when an old man in a wheelchair visits him in his office. The old man tells him that he has strange stories to tell that would make a great novel – but they will definitely get him into trouble!
Sadiq is not worried about the trouble as he is very accustomed to problems with government censorship. After hearing the old man’s stories, Sadiq starts writing a trilogy based on events that took place in Kuwait in the time before oil. About an infant kidnapped from his parents in the year 1920, a difficult year in Kuwait, involving tangled relationships of politics, tribal wars, the slave trade, the British presence, and the establishment of the American Evangelical mission. Involving time travel and fortune tellers, a powerful family tale. A magical realist tale which narrates the history of the fishing industry in Kuwait’s pre-oil era.
Alsanousi’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction-winning novel The Bamboo Stalk (2012) has been translated into 14 languages, including English, Italian and Chinese.
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World rights available
Marketing Information
Winner Of The International Prize For Arabic Fiction (Known As The ‘Arabic Booker’)
Winner Of The State Of Kuwait Prize
Financial Times Recommended Summer Read
Winner Of The 2016 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize For Arabic Literature In Translation
Voted Person Of The Year In The Kingdom Of Bahrain 2016
Zayed Book Award – shortlisted for his novel Hamam Al Dar, longlisted for Mama Hissa’s Mice and Salha’s Camel, now on the shortlist for his Scrolls of Mud City Trilogy
Shortlisted for the 2025 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the literature category.
Funding is available for translation of all literary and children’s titles that have won or have been shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
Author Biography
Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines. He currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper. His first novel THE PRISONER OF MIRRORS was published in 2010 and won the fourth Laila al-Othman Prize, a prestigious award for novels and short stories by young writers. He won the first prize for his story ‘The Bonsai and the Old Man’ in the Stories on the Air competition organised in July 2011 by the Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic.
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Sheikh Zayed Book Award
The SZBA is presented to writers, intellectuals and publishers whose writings and translations of humanities have enriched Arab cultural, literary and social life.
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