Awards Made Successful Novels… But it didn’t make great literature. By Zakaria Nimer
Translated from Arabic by The Arab Voice. July 20/2026
Awards Made Successful Novels… But it didn’t make great literature.
By Zakaria Nimer
Translated from Arabic by The Arab Voice. July 20/2026
The novel in our time has become suffering from a crisis that goes beyond the crisis of writing; it is a crisis of function and meaning. The novel, which has historically been the voice of the marginalized, a space for questioning power, and a tool for revealing the contradictions society hides, is beginning to lose its ability to confront reality. It is no longer so much the search for the truth as for acceptance, and it does not pursue the big questions as much as it seeks opportunities to be visible and celebrated. The Arab and African novel produces a large number of works today, but this abundance does not necessarily indicate the presence of great literature. Success has sometimes been measured by the number of awards, the amount of media coverage, and translation opportunities, rather than by the depth of the idea and the strength of confronting questions of man and society. Herein lies the real problem: when the novel shifts from an act of intellectual resistance to a cultural product seeking a place in the market.
Prizes may give a novel a presence, but they do not give it immortality. Literary history has preserved not only works that satisfied their time, but also those that challenged it and exposed what everyone tried to ignore. Great literature is not born out of a desire to applaud, but from the ability to upset the world and ask questions that society is afraid to face. Just look at the dozens of novels that are published each year; you will find elaborate language, carefully crafted plots, and characters that move within elegant worlds, but we will also find an absence of society’s big questions. Where are the narratives that hold tribe, sectarianism, and closed identities to account? Where are the works that discuss how the state turns into booty? Where is the narrative that reveals how corruption steals the dreams of an entire generation? Where is the novel that makes the reader feel that the reality he is living in needs to be reconstructed? A novel doesn’t die when people stop reading it; it dies when it stops saying what everyone else fears. Great literature was never just a language game, but a constant confrontation with power, whether political, religious, social, or economic. That’s why the great novels have survived for decades, while thousands of works written to satisfy prevailing taste or cultural moment have disappeared.
The problem is that many novelists no longer write because they have a case, but because they have an appointment with a publishing house, a literary prize, or a book fair. The question became: How do I write a novel that succeeds in the market? And yes: How do I write a novel that shakes the certainty of society? When the market determines the subject of the novel, writing becomes an industry rather than an intellectual position. A writer who is always preoccupied with what pleases critics, award committees, and guarantees him a media presence, gradually loses his most important possession: his freedom. In the past, he was a witness to his time, but today he has often become part of the cultural establishment, knowing what to say and what to avoid. This self-censorship is more dangerous than official censorship, because it does not need a law or a prohibition decision; it is enough for the writer to overcome fear to delete the idea before he writes it, to mitigate criticism before he publishes it, and to avoid sensitive questions for fear of losing relationships, support, or acceptance.
There is a dangerous illusion that dominates the literary scene, which is that linguistic beauty alone is enough to make a great novel. But language, no matter how creative it is, cannot hide the emptiness of the idea. A novel that does not have a vision of the world remains only a show of style, no matter how much it impresses critics. Literature that is afraid to approach open wounds, from accountability for power, corruption, and social divisions, loses its essence, no matter how artistically perfect. Take any society that is experiencing war, displacement, poverty, or division, and you will find that true stories in the streets are more powerful than many novels. In displacement camps, destroyed schools, state-displaced villages, and cities ruled by fanaticism, there are tragedies and great questions that rarely find their way into literature. However, a large part of the fiction production does not reflect the magnitude of these shifts. It is as if literature lives in a country other than the one in which people live. A writer who prefers safety to truth may maintain his position, but he loses his message. Literature is not only created to console society, but also to expose its contradictions and expose the lies it lives with so that it thinks they are facts. But the crisis begins when the prize shifts from a means of honoring creativity to a criterion that guides creativity itself. Some novelists then write the novel that they expect will be admired, not the novel that imposes itself by the power of the idea and the sincerity of the experience.
The authority is not the only party responsible for the literary crisis; cultural elites are also complicit. Some intellectuals have been preoccupied with ideological conflicts and personal battles, and with celebrating form over content. Some works are measured more by their narrative techniques than by what they say about man and society. Noise does not create immortality, and marketing does not create literature. What remains is work that reveals the truth about man and adds to his consciousness something he did not see. Arab and African societies do not need narratives to complement them; they need narratives that disturb them. You don’t need perfect characters, but characters that reveal their contradictions. You don’t need literature that escapes reality, but literature that makes confronting reality unavoidable. Rather, what truth am I going to tell that no one else dares to say?” Only then does true literature begin, and the novel regains its function as a testimony to the times, not a commodity in the market of culture
