Cairo Book Fair -- or Cairo Blook Fair?

Marwa Rakha at Global Voices highlights a trend at the Cairo Book Fair, quoting a post from blogger Mohamed Hamdy highlighting the 15+ titles by bloggers available at the Fair, supported by CBF's first-ever seminar to discuss the growing phenomenon of bloggers getting published. The seminar is organized by the renowned writer Youssef Al Ka'eed and bloggers Ghada Abdel Aal, Shady Aslan, and Mayada Medhat. This is definitely a particularly Egyptian phenomenon, of bloggers publishing *novels* based on blogs, as opposed to essayistic or memoiristic texts...

__Updated 28/01/09__

Marwa Rakha posts more news: traditional writers have called these Egyptian blooks "Kleenex" (because they see them as over-intimate and disposable, I guess). Blogger Ahmed Al Sabbagh hits back with a link to Ghada Abdel Aal's video, where she quotes Tawfiq El-Hakim describing the essence of real literature:

It is the open air literature; the literary expression of freedom and passion; words that reach out from one heart to another exposing the depth of the human psyche in freedom, honesty, and sincerity. Tawfiq El-Hakim also said that our share of such kind of literature is minimal just as much as our share of honesty and openness is minimal - This is exactly what we as bloggers do.

The Nobel Art of Blogging

Jose Saramago has started a blog. It's in Portuguese, so if you speak the language it looks like a great way to get the inside scoop on a Nobel Laureate's writing process, particularly as Fernando Mereilles' film adaptation of Saramago's Blindness is released.

Saramago will be welcomed to the litblogging community by writers Ghada Abdel Aal, Marwa Rakha, and Rajaa Alsanea, who are part of a new trend in the Middle East for gossip-girl novels based on blogs. These women writers have successfully used the internet as a forum in which to speak about the inner lives of Arabic women, to dispense advice about marriage, men and education, and have found a following for their work. Where Rakha is a sharp, secular critic, Alsanea writes about balancing halal behaviour and belief with the desire to be an emancipated, educated woman. All three point to the hypocrisies and double standards exploited by men in their societies -- but their powerful critiques are delicately layered inside what seems like Sex and the City fluff.

Perhaps these aren't novels that might win a Nobel prize for Literature, but can the time be far off when a blook wins one of the major literary awards?