For publishers, the message is commercial as much as ethical: the green novel now comes with institutional momentum, prize backing and a transnational critical community.
The 2026 incarnation in brief
The fourth Tunis Arab Novel Forum closed on 14 November after four days at the Chedly Klibi City of Culture in Tunis. Organised by the House of the Novel under Tunisia’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, it brought together 25 writers, critics and researchers – seven Tunisians and eighteen from across the Arab world – under the theme “The Green Novel: Representations of Reality and the Horizons of Narrative”.
The Forum
The forum is a young but fast-rising regional fixture. Its third incarnation ran through 11-13 December 2025, again convening writers and critics from eighteen Arab countries.
The host matters: the House of the Novel has made the forum its flagship platform for the Arabic novel, and the 2026 edition coincided with the Comar d’Or – Tunisia’s flagship novel prize, founded in 1997 for novels in Arabic or French – going to Nasr Belhaj Taieb’s Saif Al-Sawan, an eco-themed work that anchored the forum’s closing study session.
What the debates signalled
The closing panel treated nature not as scenery but as a fully fledged character capable of directing narrative. Hoshang Ossi invoked Lawrence Buell’s environmental criticism, while Mohamed Tarzi examined “narratives of ecocide” and the slow violence inflicted on Jabal Amel since 2023.
Earlier sessions ranged across desert narratives, the literary memory of water, oil development in Gulf societies and women’s environmental writing. The closing recommendations urged cultural institutions and environmental associations to create literary prizes and joint publishing initiatives, and called on critics to build proper tools of environmental criticism.
The View From The Beach
First, a commissioning signal: green fiction is now an institutional priority in the Arab world, so rights teams should expect more eco-themed Arabic novels seeking translation.
Second, infrastructure: demand for environmental criticism creates openings for academic lists and translated theory.
Third, partnerships: the forum explicitly invited cross-sector literary prizes and publishing ventures – a template for co-publication and sponsorship.
The forum’s director, Younes Soltani, framed literature as “no longer an aesthetic luxury” but a means of defending the planet. For publishers, the message is commercial as much as ethical: the green novel now comes with institutional momentum, prize backing and a transnational critical community.
Lists that ignore it risk missing where Arabic fiction is heading next.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
