Let’s Kill CNN and Nobel

Two ambitious Gulf projects are attempting to leave their cultural footprints on the world.

After Al-Jazeera English launched with the intention of wooing English speakers who are sick of CNN’s bias, the United Arab Emirates launched -you guessed it- the world’s largest book award with prizes worth 7 million Dirhams (Just below 2 million US dollars). The catch of course, is that the book has to be written in Arabic.

But there’s an inherent irony in the Sheikh Zayed book prize:
The world’s largest book prize is given away in the region of the world that produces least books to the world’s least avid readers. In other words, Arab writers are now much more likely than their western counterparts to make big prize money from their writings, considering how little readership they have.