Mohammed Hasan Alwan, recipient of this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction in Der Spiegel, interview by by Susanne Koelbl:

"The combination of travel and wisdom is hard for me to resist. I therefore decided to bridge the knowledge gap about his personal life by using my imagination. Only fiction can pick up what history has ignored."

Read the interview here.

Novelists take care of the crumbs, the left-overs. After the historians stopped working on their plates they search for the small pieces. A humble but wise defense of fiction.