Trustees
An independent Board of Trustees, drawn from across the Arab world and beyond, is responsible for the overall management of the Prize. A Trustee who is a publisher in an Arabic publishing house may only serve one single three year term of office. The current Trustees are shown in alphabetical order below.
Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into nearly thirty languages), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. Ahdaf Soueif is also a political and cultural commentator.
Evelyn (Eve) Smith
Evelyn (Eve) Smith is formerly the Secretary of the Booker Prize Foundation, and has been involved in governance and high-level administration and policy setting of a variety of charity and not for profit organisations in the UK. Her background is as a lawyer, and she was a partner in a commercial law firm in the City of London.
Isobel Abulhoul OBE
Isobel Abulhoul was born and educated in Cambridge, United Kingdom, before moving to Dubai in 1968 (her home ever since). There she co-founded the bookshop chain, Magrudy’s, in 1975 and has since been actively engaged in promoting reading and writing schemes for children and teachers alike for the region.
Michel S. Moushabeck
Michel S. Moushabeck is a writer, editor, publisher, and musician. He is the founder of Interlink Publishing, a 25-year-old, Massachusetts-based independent publishing house specializing in fiction-in-translation, history, and cultural guides.
Professor Rasheed El-Enany
Professor Rasheed El-Enany is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature and Dean of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies; Professor Emeritus of the University of Exeter where he taught and researched into modern Arabic literature for 35 years.
Professor Yasir Suleiman CBE
Professor Yasir Suleiman is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees. He is also His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said Professor of Modern Arabic Studies at the University of Cambridge, Professorial Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians of Edinburgh (FRCPE). He is also Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and Director of the Prince Alwaleed Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge.
Seif Salmawy
Seif Salmawy is the CEO and co-founder of Al Karma Publishers (Egypt). Previous senior positions include Executive Director of the Qatar Foundation Publishing Center, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, and Publishing Director at Dar Al Shorouk (Egypt). Seif holds an MA in Cultural Heritage Management from the University of York, UK.
Yassin Adnan
Yassin Adnan is a Moroccan writer and broadcaster, born in Safi, Morocco, in 1970. Since his early childhood he has lived in Marrakech and for more than two decades has worked in cultural journalism. In 1991, he published the Contemporary Voices magazine and then Poetry Raid, which embodied the new poetic sensibility prevalent in Morocco in the early 1990s.
Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh
Zaki Anwar Nusseibeh is an advisor at the UAE Presidential Court. Born in Jerusalem and educated in Jerusalem and the United Kingdom before settling in Abu Dhabi, Zaki Nusseibeh began his career there as a journalist in 1967. He became Director of Information in the Abu Dhabi, then the UAE, Ministry of Information, editing its first official newspapers.