Omaima Al-Khamis

Writer and Novelist

Umaima Al-Khamis is a Saudi writer and novelist and among the Kingdom's most prominent literary voices. She won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2018 for The Book Smuggler, which follows a bookseller's journey from Nishapur to al-Andalus in the eleventh century. Her other fiction includes Al-Bahriyat and Al-Warifa, alongside her cultural journalism. Her writing works on the city, memory and the transformations of Saudi society, and on the place of women in narrative and in social history.