Middle East conflict informs much contemporary YA fiction, but it is not the only setting: other writers also tackle disapora experiences (many YA authors live outside the region), social issues and science-fiction and fantasy. In 2018, The Oil’s Secret Tale won the Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature in the Young Adult category. Daqqa wrote the book behind bars: he was sentenced to life in prison in 1986 for helping plan an operation that ended in the death of an Israeli soldier. Walid Daqqa’s The Oil’s Secret Tale is about a boy who is helped by animals and an olive tree to visit his father in prison. The past two years have seen seen the publication of several especially striking YA novels.
Middle East conflict informs much contemporary YA fiction but it is not the only setting I still happen today to perceive them in the same way.” Idriss, now editor of Al-Adab magazine, told the French National Library for Children: “I perceived many things, such as love, sexual desires, friendship, through the prism of war and politics.
The country was in the middle of sectarian and political division but, as he later said, he was still able to experience all the things that teenagers usually go through.
One of the earliest Arabic YA novels was Refuge by Samah Idriss, published in 2005 and based on his life during the Lebanese Civil War, which broke out in 1975 when he was 14. In the Middle East and North Africa, stories by YA authors have an additional edge, devoured as they are by readers who either want representation in the books they read, or to better understand the cultures of the region. Yet while YA fiction is usually marketed at youngsters aged 12 to 18, most readers are adults, drawn to coming-of-age stories that explore themes including romance, friendship, sexuality, identity and the supernatural.
0 kommentar(er)
