Irakilaisen Alia Mamdouhin romaani al-Tanki on ehdolla International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2020 -palkinnon saajaksi.

The Tank explores the relationship between human beings and places which have been taken away from them. After four decades of exile, the writer imagines her return to Iraq and begins her journey of observing the huge changes experienced by the country and society. It is a literary return with a tragic undertone, and interwoven with the text is the life of the writer who has shared with her characters the upheavals which have shaken her homeland.

Alia Mamdouh is an Iraqi writer and novelist, born in 1944. She studied Psychology and graduated from Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad, in 1971. For more than ten years, she edited the weekly Baghdad paper Al-Rasid. After leaving Baghdad in 1982, she lived in various cities. In 1973, Mamdouh published a short story collection entitled Overture for Laughter and this was followed by eight novels, some of which have been translated into English, French, Italian and Spanish.