Born and raised in Mecca, Alem brings the geography and oral memory of the holy city into a fiction of saturated sensual detail. Tawq al-Hamam (The Dove's Necklace, 2010) — a murder mystery set in the alleys of Mecca, with the city itself as one of the narrators — won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2011, jointly with the Moroccan novelist Mohammed Achaari. She was the first woman to win the prize.
Recurring themes
Mecca as a literary city
women under the Saudi religious order
the city as narrator
the dense sensorium of the Hijaz
Selected works
- 2003My Thousand and One Nights
- 2001Khatim
- 2010The Dove's Necklace
- 2018Sarab