Hassanine Ben Ammou

Hassanine Ben Ammou is a leading Tunisian novelist and visual artist born in Dar Chaabane in 1948. He spearheaded the new Arabic historical novel in Tunisia and has published more than a dozen historical novels that deal with late medieval and early modern Tunisian history, some of which have been adopted for television and radio. He is the recipient of the prestigious Tunisia Novel Grand Prize for Eternal Sunset (al-Ghurūb al-khālid) in 2007. Critics and readers compare his novels to those of Jurji Zaydan (d. 1914), founder of the Arabic historical novel.