Jokha Alharthi

Alharthi grew up in Oman and earned a PhD in classical Arabic poetry at the University of Edinburgh, an academic grounding that shows in Celestial Bodies' dense, allusive prose. She has taught Arabic literature at Sultan Qaboos University while continuing to publish fiction and children's books in Arabic.

Celestial Bodies (2010) follows three sisters in the village of al-Awafi as Oman itself transforms within a single generation, from a society still entangled with slavery into an oil-wealthy modern state, its nonchronological structure circling between more than a dozen narrators rather than following any one of them straight through.

In 2019 it won the International Booker Prize, the first win for a Gulf writer and the first for any novel originally written in Arabic: a breakthrough Alharthi has said she hopes opens English-language readers to more of the region's fiction.