Mohammed Hasan Alwan

Mohammed Hasan Alwan is a Saudi Arabian novelist born in 1979 in Riyadh. He is one of the most important voices in contemporary Saudi and Gulf Arabic literature, known for fiction that engages with history, identity, and the experience of being Arab in the modern world. He has studied and worked in the United States and Canada and brings a cosmopolitan perspective to his fiction. Alwan is the author of several novels including Saqf al-Kifaya (The Roof of Sufficiency, 2002), Tawtawq al-Hamam (The Mourning Dove, 2010), and al-Qandi (2013). His debut was published when he was a student and established him as a significant new voice in Arabic fiction. A Small Death (Mawt Saghir), his IPAF-winning novel of 2017, is a fictionalized biography of the historical Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), following him across the Islamic world — from Andalusia to Mecca to Anatolia — in a spiritual and geographical journey. The novel is a major achievement of historical imagination, recreating the medieval Islamic world with vividness and philosophical depth. Alwan is recognized as one of the most accomplished Saudi novelists of his generation, working in the tradition of Arabic historical fiction while bringing contemporary concerns to bear on medieval subjects.