Abdo Khal also refused to comment on the Arab Publishing Union’s refusal to get involved in the legal battle between him and Mohammed Raheem.
He added that the case was subjudice and that he did not want to speak on the issue until it was resolved. He reiterated that the mention of Raheem’s name in “She Throws Sparks” and any similarities between the composer and a character that had the same name and profession was purely coincidental.
Khal was speaking at a weekly cultural event hosted in his honor by well-known businessman and cultural promoter Abdul Makhsout Khoja. He also refused to say from where he obtained the photographs of women featured in the novel. “Who told you I got the photos from the Internet? Leave that (issue) aside,” he said, responding to a question from the audience.
Khal did not realize he had managed to impress women attending the event who were seated in a separate hall when he refused to evaluate women novelists as a separate group. He added that he was against any segregation between genders and claimed people could only live, communicate, and move forward together when they stopped isolating each other.
“Abdo Khal is a woman because he is a product of a woman,” he said to rapturous applause from the women. Khal did not see winning the Arabic Booker as breaking the run of Egyptian winners of the prize for two years in a row.
He said he wrote literature for productive and creative reasons, not for winning prizes. Khal added that writers do not have any influence over the nomination process.
“The publishing houses nominate novels for the prize. After that campaigning starts,” he said.
He said that he did not get involved in any political battles to win the prize and did not even expect to end up as the eventual winner, adding that he found out about his nomination through his friends.
He said that the novel, originally available at the Riyadh Book Fair, was removed from shelves after the event. He added that books written by the ministers of information and labor were also banned in the Kingdom, claiming that the reason was “the strange double standards applied in banning some books.”
