Saud Alsanousi

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist, playwright and journalist, born in 1981. ¹ He debuted with The Prisoner of Mirrors (2010); his novel The Bamboo Stalk, about migrant labour and identity in the Gulf, won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013, making him its youngest winner. ² His works include Mama Hissa's Mice, on sectarianism in Kuwait, and the trilogy The Scrolls of Mud City (2023–2024). ¹

Alsanousi was born in Kuwait in 1981 and is a member of the Kuwaiti Writers Association, writing full-time. ² He has written for Kuwaiti and Gulf newspapers and magazines including Al-Watan, Al-Arabi and Al-Kuwait, and joined the writers of Zahrat Al-Khaleej magazine in 2018. ² As a writer-in-residence at the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Centre he adapted the Memoirs of a Sailor musical (2019) and wrote the play New Jibla (2020). ¹ He describes writing as a necessity rather than a luxury, a way to resist forgetting and to understand a world he says he writes about precisely because he does not understand it. ¹ The sources name no religion for Alsanousi himself; sectarianism and identity are the subjects of his novels, and a novelist's subjects are not attestation of his own affiliation, so the museum records none. ^{1 3}

His novels are The Prisoner of Mirrors (2010), which won the Laila al-Othman Prize, The Bamboo Stalk (2012), which won the Kuwait State Encouragement Award and then the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was translated into more than fourteen languages and adapted as a television series in 2016, Mama Hissa's Mice (2015), on sectarian division in Kuwait and later banned there, Pigeons of the House (2017), Saleha's Camel (2019), and the historical trilogy The Scrolls of Mud City (2023–2024), set in the Kuwait of pearl divers and merchants. ^{2 1} His short story The Bonsai and the Old Man won first prize in the Stories on Air competition run by Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic in 2011, and he was named Cultural Personality of the Year by the Mohammed Al-Banki Award in Bahrain in 2016. ¹

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