You could be forgiven for thinking the 45th Sharjah International Book Fair had finished, as the trade media packs its bags and heads home after the Publishing Conference.
But the rel event, and the discussions that will define literature, not book-selling, is just gathering steam.
Moroccan literary critic Dr Said Yaktine – named Cultural Personality of the Year – delivered a message that cuts to the heart of contemporary publishing: embrace change, but never at the cost of cultural memory.
A Critic of Both Tradition and Technology
Yaktine is no nostalgic traditionalist. Born in Casablanca in 1955, he earned a State Doctorate from Mohammed V University in Rabat in 1997 and has published more than twenty books spanning classical Arabic narrative, popular epics and digital literature. His critical method emerged in the 1980s through studies of narrative time, voice and point of view, later expanding into hypertext and interactive media; in 2011 he was elected President of the Arab Internet Writers Union.
He won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2016 for Al-Fikr al-Adabi al-‘Arabi (Arabic Literary Thought) and the Katara Prize in 2022 for applied narratology. His career, in short, embodies the very synthesis he preaches.
The Weight of Popular Culture
In his SIBF session, ‘The Memory of Storytelling and the Breadth of Thought’, Yaktine insisted that popular culture – food, customs, oral traditions, neighbourhood life – carries value equal to formal culture. He recalled the public squares of his Casablanca childhood, where storytellers held audiences across successive evenings. Such spaces, he noted, are vanishing as cities commercialise.
The View From the Beach
For publishing professionals, the implications are practical. Digital platforms now shape how younger readers discover, consume and share stories, either directly (ebook/print) or indirectly via social media influencers. Publishers – inside and outside the country – are focussed on the sale more than the culture.
Yaktine’s call to “intervene, guide and mentor” is a brief for active curation: acquiring works that interrogate local experience while remaining conversant with global literary trends. “The true novelist should return to authentic patterns of life,” he argued – a standard equally applicable to lists, translations and rights strategy.
Sharjah’s Platform
The setting rams home the scale of the conversation: SIBF 2026 hosts 2,673 publishers and exhibitors from 124 countries, with 1,500 cultural events and Oman as Guest of Honour. Fewer venues offer a better test bed for balancing cultural specificity with international reach.
But Yaktine’s proposition can ultimately be seen as commercial just as much as cultural: authenticity and modernity are not rivals but partners – and publishers who broker that partnership will define the next chapter of the book trade.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
