Muhammed Abu Maatouk

Muhammed Abu Maatouk is a Syrian playwright, born in Aleppo in 1950. He graduated with a BA in Arabic Language from Aleppo University in 1975 and published his first two plays in Damascus in 1978. Many of his plays are for children and he has also written eight novels, short stories and scripts for successful television soaps. His first novel was The Tree of Speech (Dar al-Raes, London, 1990) and The Bottle and the Genie (Al-Kawkab, Beirut, 2008) reached the longlist of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009. He has won various literary awards for his writing.