GU-Q Staff Member Wins HBKU Arabic Writing Contest

GU-Q staff member and Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU) Ph.D. candidate, Mohamed Shokeir, was announced as the winner of an Arabic writing competition hosted by the HBKU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, a member of Qatar Foundation.

Open to all HBKU students, the writing competition was launched in response to the Amir, His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s call to protect and promote the Arabic language, and organized by the International Student Club. The call for submissions was for any original work in Arabic with a limit of four pages, including short story, poetry, or essay. 

The top three winners were chosen out of a pool of 8 finalists, selected by an external committee of judges. Shokeir won the first prize for his short story titled “From the Diary of an Old Man on the Arab Spring”, an autobiographical account of his return to his homeland at the outbreak of the Egyptian uprising in 2011, where he was sent on location to produce a television program for Al Jazeera news network. 

In his short work, Shokeir shares his nostalgic observations and deeply personal reflections as he revisits the people and places he once knew very well. Touching on themes of identity and diasporic experience, his story encapsulates the struggle of a returning migrant faced with a homeland that has changed, and the realization that he too has changed, leaving him no choice but to return to his voluntary exile. 

The Arabic writing prizes were announced at a lunch gathering held at Chef’s Garden restaurant in Education City hosted by Dr. Amal Mohammed Al-Malki, founding dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at HBKU.  Shokeir is the Arabic Media Writer in the Department of Communications at GU-Q, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in translation studies at HBKU