Jokha Alharthi

Jokha Alharthi (Arabic: جوخة الحارثي‎, born July 1978)[1] also spelt al-Harthi, is an Omani writer and academic. She was educated in Oman and in the United Kingdom. She obtained her PhD in classical Arabic literature from Edinburgh University. She is currently an associate professor in the Arabic department at Sultan Qaboos University.[2]

Alharthi has published three collections of short stories, three children's books, and three novels (Manamat, Sayyidat el-Qamar and Narinjah).[3] She has also authored academic works. Her work has been translated into English, Serbian, Korean, Italian, and German and published in Banipal magazine.[4] She was also one of eight participants in the 2011 IPAF Nadwa (writers' workshop). Alharthi won the Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Arts and Literature, for her novel Narinjah (Bitter Orange) in 2016. Narinjah will be published in English translation in 2021.[5]

Sayyidat el-Qamar was shortlisted for the Zayed Award 2011. An English translation by Marilyn Booth was published in the UK by Sandstone Press in June 2018 under the title Celestial Bodies, and won the Man Booker International Prize 2019.[6] Sayyidat el-Qamar was the first work by an Arabic-language writer to be awarded the Man Booker International Prize, and the first novel by an Omani woman to appear in English translation. [7] The Man Booker International Prize judges heralded the book as "A richly imagined, engaging and poetic insight into a society in transition and into lives previously obscured."[1] As of 2020, translation rights to Sayyidat el-Qamar have been sold in Azerbaijani, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Malayalam, Norwegian, Persian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Sinhalese, Slovenian, Swedish, Turkish.

In March 2020 she appeared in a panel discussion at Adelaide Writers' Week, along with Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni and Lebanese-British journalist Zahra Hankir.[8]