Observations on Abu Dhabi

All spring, Abu Dhabi's airport, shopping malls and heavily chandeliered luxury hotels have been plastered with golden banners announcing the "second-largest book award in the world": the Sheikh Zayed Book Awards. Like Martin Newland's new English-language newspaper, the National, the £950,000, nine-category prize, now in its third year, represents a fraction of the £100bn pledged by the emirate's government to generate a "cultural revival" in the Arab world. The aim is for Abu Dhabi to surpass not just Cairo and Beirut, but also New York, Paris and London as the global "cultural hub" - a home for writers, artists and intellectuals as well as bankers and oil executives.

Yet the glitz and hyperbole bear no relation to the realities endured by Arab writers. Print runs struggle to reach the low thousands, copyright is patchy or non-existent, distribution networks are ineffectual, and writers and translators are squeezed between heavy-handed government censors and an increasingly dictatorial religious establishment.

Even the best-known must either emigrate or pursue a second career to survive. The Egyptian writer and dentist Alaa al-Aswany estimates that Arabic-language royalties from his bestselling novel of corruption in Cairo, The Yacoubian Building (2002), barely covered the cost of the cigarettes and coffee he consumed while writing it.

Abu Dhabi's solution, in the business-driven world of the Gulf, is to spur literary growth with investment and publicity. The Sheikh Zayed Book Awards, named after the country's revered first president and administered by members of the ruling elite, are a matter of national pride. But are their literary aspirations genuine?

I meet the Kuwaiti writer Hooda al-Shawa Qaddumi, winner of the children's award, at a book fair in Sharjah's cavernous new Expo Centre. "The prize is great - there's very little Arabic literature for children," Shawa tells me. "Nothing like Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson or J K Rowling."

Around her, the fair bustles with Emirati teenagers on school trips - groups of headscarved, pinafored girls and boys in dishdashas, one accessorised with a do-rag and heavy hip-hop chain jewellery. They seem an unlikely readership for Shawa's impeccably conservative book The Birds' Journey to Mount Qaf, a retelling in verse of a 12th-century Persian poem. "We don't invest enough in our tradition and heritage," she says, backtracking slightly. "It's just as exciting as anything you'd read in the west."

"We are addressing all of these issues - censorship, education, print runs, copyright," says the Sheikh Zayed Award organiser Dr Ali al-Noaimi. Yet when I ask him whether he plans to support younger writers and more experimental work from the region, he looks impatient. "It's our strategy to create a cultural hub in Abu Dhabi at the international level, not just the Arab level."

And the awards are shot through with this distinct lack of literary goodwill. At the lavish televised ceremony that evening, there are many quotations from the president and crown prince, much discussion of "cultural hubs", and next to no mention of writers or writing. The winner in the literature category, the prolific Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Kouni, has lived in Switzerland since 1993. He becomes similarly impatient when I ask whether the awards will help writers struggling with more difficult regional circumstances.

"A true writer knows no boundaries," he snaps. "Sholokhov and Mann wrote under Stalin and Hitler. It's a flaw in the novelists themselves if they can't write about what they want."

Writers outside the government-funded golden circle are matter-of-fact about the prizes' limitations. "Literary awards in the Arab world are always ceremonial, detached from the concerns of writers and readers, and this is no exception," says the Palestinian writer and Abu Dhabi resident Huzama Habayeb.

But it is this detachment, not its western critics' historically nonsensical assertion that "you can't buy culture", that is most likely to stifle the government's literary ambitions. Arab readers buy and borrow books in huge numbers - when it is something they want to read. Girls of Riyadh (2005), a tale of illicit drinking, driving and rebellion in Saudi Arabia, sold at least 70,000 copies. It is hard to imagine the Sheikh Zayed winners, vetted by Abu Dhabi's decidedly undemocratic government, becoming so popular - and hard to imagine writers flocking to an emirate whose cultural aspirations are undercut by deep political conservatism.

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