My Cat Writes a Book

The particular pleasure of getting the Sawiris Cultural Award for Children Literature in Egypt

By Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

CAIRO: The special pleasure of receiving the prominent Sawiris Cultural Award for Children Literature was that it was my first award in Egypt, my homeland!

I have been awarded and honored several times around the world. There were international recognitions with the 2014 Manhae Grand Prize in Literature (South Korea), the 2015 Arab Journalism Award in Culture (UAE), the 2021 the Gold Medal, Eurasian Literary Festival LIFFT, Istanbul (Turkey) and the 2022 Medal of the Most Prominent Patrons of Literature, Pan African Writers Association, Ibadan (Nigeria).

The list is quite long; yet, the most important award is the one I got in the presence of my wife, TV director Fatema Al Zahraa Hassan.

Writing for children is not particularly easy and it is not confined to the talent of narration. It demands hard work and deep research that combine the skills of language, science, and the ability to address the new generation.

It is also a mirror of my biography; so, I presented to children poetry, travel literature, adventure, story, and novel, all of which I addressed to adults first, before I opted for a special language suitable for young people, with eloquent and modern vocabulary.

This particular work took a marathon time to reach the final form presented to the readers.

After a year of research and writing, there were 900 days of waiting for publication, due to the Corona pandemic. After publishing, it was nominated for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Children Literature, but it did not get the award.

Therefore, with the addition of the Children Literature branch to the Sawiris Cultural Awards, the chance came again to compete and win.

From the core of reality came the idea of “My Cat Writes a Book”.

My family got a cat that gave birth to another, and there were two cats at home. My wife goes to work, my two daughters go to their school, and the two cats remain in my company, taking turns sitting at my desk, looking politely at what I write, so the spark of the idea came to me.

As I believe that there is no children’s literature without science, I had to use the capabilities of science and technology to convince the readers that the cat was the one who wrote the book.

Getting inspired for the book 

The book came in two parts; the first presents the adventures and the second documents the cats’ messages to the main character cat, which are letters that mix experience and coexistence with research and reading.

Cats – from another angle – are beings that share life with us on this planet, and teach – those who own them -many good lessons.

Cat breeding offers lessons in love, cleanliness, understanding those who cannot express themselves, belief in everyone’s abilities to think, and acceptance of difference.

My previous experiences in children’s literature were poetry, and I was pleased that some of my poems were included in school curricula, whether in Lebanon, or in India for students of the Arabic language, or in East Africa.

Then I presented a series of adventures on the Silk Road that ran weekly for four years. My books were authored or translated. There is the story of an Egyptian painter who lived five thousand years, who tells the story of fine art in Egypt from the time of the ancient Egyptians until today.

I hope that curriculum planners give it a look to teach our students the history and art of Egypt along centuries.

I was also keen on transferring international literature to the Arabic language, such as Korean folk tales and the epic poems of the Tatar poet Abdullah Tokai.