Ali Muhammad Wins Al-Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity

The story collection “Sixteen Braids” of  the Syrian Ali Ammar Muhammad won the first place in  Al-Sharjah Prize for Arab Creativity in the category of  best story collection for the year 2019-2020.

“The braid symbolizes the woman. The protagonists  of my stories are all women and my story collection raises and discusses many issues that concern women in general and eastern women in particular, including  early marriage, the widowed woman, and violence against women.” Ali said to the Syria Times e-newspaper.

He went on to say:” I challenged myself as a man and tried to get deep into the woman’s heart and mind and to understand her feelings. I tried to think exactly as she thinks and feel the way she feels, then I wrote about all of this from my point of view”.

 ” I presented my stories in a different style and a different vision, as in the story, “Behind the Curtains of Paper,” the division was in the form of letters. In all the stories the problem appears, but without a solution. They present the problem in an emotional way and with passion that takes the reader into the world if a woman and so sympathizes with her pain,” Muhammad concluded.

It is worth mentioning that Ali Ammar Muhammad was born in Latakia in 1997 and is now a student at the Faculty of Law, University of Damascus.

Interviewed by Amal Farhat