The contemporary period — roughly from the founding of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008 to the present — is one of the most internationally visible decades Arabic literature has had. The IPAF and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award have professionalised Arabic literary prize culture. The Library of Arabic Literature has produced bilingual editions of the classical canon. The Hoopoe and Banipal imprints have built a distribution channel for contemporary Arabic fiction in English.
Within the Arabic-language sphere, the major events of the period include the international success of Alaa Al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building, the rise of the Iraqi diaspora generation around Sinan Antoon, Hassan Blasim, and Ahmed Saadawi, the new visibility of Gulf fiction through Jokha Alharthi's International Booker win, and the revival of the long Arabic novel in the work of Elias Khoury and Rabee Jaber.
The Arab Spring of 2011 supplies a recurring backdrop and, in some places, a recurring subject — the Egyptian uprising memoir, the Syrian war fiction, the Tunisian post-revolution novel — without producing, so far, a single defining "Arab Spring novel" in the way that the Lebanese civil war eventually produced its.