Sultan Qaboos Award Honors Sami Al Ghawi & Yahya Al Mundhiri

Thirty Years of Reed and Ink: Inside the 13th Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Arts and Literature

From a classical calligrapher who picked up the reed pen in 1992 to a short-story writer charting forgotten human moments—and a jury willing to leave a podium empty—this year’s Omani cycle rewards patience over easy applause.

In classical Arabic calligraphy, freedom does not come from throwing away the ruler. Every letter carries an inherited geometry measured in dots, nib widths, and balanced negative space. When dozens of master calligraphers are asked to set the exact same sentence inside the outline of a circle, an oval, or a single drop of water, they work with identical tools: burnished paper, natural inks, and hand-trimmed reed pens. Yet no two compositions ever turn out alike.

For Omani calligrapher Sami bin Zain bin Saeed Al Ghawi, who first began studying the discipline closely with its masters in late 1992 and early 1993, that tension between strict rule and personal invention has occupied more than three decades of daily practice. On Wednesday at the Diwan of Royal Court, his persistence was recognized when H.E. Habib bin Mohammed Al Riyami, Head of the Sultan Qaboos Higher Centre for Culture and Science, named Al Ghawi a laureate of the 13th cycle of the Sultan Qaboos Award for Culture, Arts and Literature in the Arts branch for Arabic Calligraphy.

Alongside Al Ghawi, Omani writer Yahya bin Salam Al Mundhiri won the Literature branch in the Short Story category for his sixth collection, A Brief Time for Panic (Waqt Qasir Lil-Hala’). In the Culture branch—dedicated this cycle to Family and Childhood Studies in the Sultanate of Oman—the judging panel recommended withholding the prize altogether, marking the sixth time in the award’s history that a category has gone unrewarded rather than compromise its scholarly benchmark.

Inventing Within the Measure of the Reed

Dedicated exclusively to Omani creators in its 2026 cycle—before rotating back to pan-Arab competition next term under the framework established by Royal Decree No. 18/2011—the 13th edition drew 204 eligible entries between March and July. Forty-one calligraphers competed in the Arts branch, where entries passed through an August preliminary screening before final deliberations by jurors Dr. Salman bin Amer Al Hajri, Dr. Muthanna Abdulhamid Al Obaidi, and Sultan bin Muslim Al Rashdi in November.

The jury selected Al Ghawi’s work for its command of the Thuluth Jali script, noting how his visual structure balanced dense letterforms with open breathing room while carrying an intellectual resonance suited to the present moment. Reflecting on a thirty-year path marked by stretches of difficulty as well as breakthroughs, Al Ghawi described true mastery in calligraphy as creating a composition no predecessor has attempted without stepping outside the classical canons of the craft. Bound to polished paper and cut reed pens rather than freeform brushwork, the calligrapher earns an unmistakable personal signature solely through proportion, rhythm, and spatial imagination.

Forgotten Lives in A Brief Time for Panic

Competition was fiercest in the Short Story field, which attracted 113 eligible manuscripts—more than half of all submissions across the award. Evaluating the entries independently before convening in Muscat between 8 and 11 November, final jurors Prof. Dr. Abdulghani Bara, Dr. Suad Abdullah Al Anzi, and Dr. Mahmoud bin Mohammed Al Rahbi awarded the prize to Al Mundhiri’s A Brief Time for Panic.

In its citation, the committee highlighted the collection’s postmodern narrative structure, temporal shifts, sharp ironies, and multiple voices, paired with disciplined language that brings overlooked human details back into focus. For Al Mundhiri, receiving the honor for his sixth book affirms a view of fiction he has held throughout his career: that writing begins in affection and curiosity, taking ordinary human situations from lived reality and reshaping them inside imagined worlds to uncover what habit renders invisible.

Why an Empty Podium Matters

Equally revealing was the announcement in the Culture branch, where 50 researchers submitted works on Family and Childhood Studies in Oman. While H.E. Habib bin Mohammed Al Riyami acknowledged the effort and knowledge evident across the submissions, the final judging panel found methodological and structural gaps in theoretical framing, documentation, and analytical integration.

“Relative distinction among submitted works is not a sufficient justification for granting the award unless they achieve the required scholarly standard of originality, quality, and methodological coherence,” Al Riyami explained during the press conference. Rather than simply closing the file, the panel recommended sending its detailed critical notes directly to the participating researchers so they can refine their future scholarship. Having previously withheld prizes in Architectural Design (2017), Folk Poetry (2018), Sociology Studies (2019), Film Directing (2023), and Omani Environmental Studies (2024), the Sultan Qaboos Award continues to signal that the prestige of an honor rests as much on the prizes it refuses to hand out lightly as on the lifelong artists and writers it celebrates.