2017 Excellence-in-Features Award 🥉
The Society for Features Journalism has awarded me third prize for arts and entertainment commentary in their 2017 Excellence in Features awards. Here are links to my award-winning portfolio of work:
Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Winter 2016.
Sattouf has started new conversations about Arab identity in France as well as across the Arab region... To write about the past is to finally part with it, to find meaning in it, and thus to shape one’s own future.”
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Los Angeles Review of Books, July 9, 2016.
In the past decade, and especially since the 2011 uprisings, talented Arab artists have traded comics for comix. Alternative zines, web strips, graphic novels, and other underground publications encompass a diversity of aesthetics, narrative techniques, and political messages. Today, Beirut, Cairo, and Casablanca each have their own Crumbs, Spiegelmans, and Moulys.
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The Art Newspaper, December 16, 2016
Over the past year, the Egyptian artist Mohamed Abla has made more than 60 mixed-media works that are fairy tales for adults from the hive mind of Eastern mythology. From afar, they are Pop art in pastels, but upon closer inspection his works synthesise collage and calligraphy, abstraction and tradition, the natural and the supernatural.
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(Top Image by Islam Gawish, the Egyptian cartoonist.)