Biography

Fareed Ramadan (Arabic: فريد رمضان, November 4, 1961 – November 6, 2020) is a Bahraini novelist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is often considered one of the most prominent Gulf novelists and worked to deconstruct the discourse of racism through his work on cultural identities in Bahrain, to the point that some critics called him a "novelist of identities." Among his most prominent works are the novel The English Ocean and the screenplay of the film The Sleeping Tree.Born on Muharraq Island, Ramadan published his first collection of stories in 1984, entitled البياض ("White"). He worked part-time from the time he was very young at the local newspapers, Al-Adwaa and Al Ayam. Later, he became the culture editor at other papers, Al-Watan and Al-Waqt, as well as the magazine, Hana Bahrain. He has written many screenplays for radio and television, and has also written commercials and documentaries. He has written both feature and short film scripts for many directors in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Palestine. Ramadan and Bahraini director Mohammed Rashed Bu Ali founded their own studio, Nuran Pictures. His first novel, غيمة لباب البحرين ("A Cloud for Bab Al Bahrain"), was published in 1994 by Kalimat Books, owned by the Bahrain Writers’ Association. His 2007 novel, السوافح؛ ماء النعيم ("Clematis: Water of Bliss"), won first prize in a national fiction award from the Ministry of Information. His work is marked by an interest in the issue of identity, particularly in light of the massive immigration to the Gulf in recent years and its accompanying socioeconomic changes. Ramadan was born the fifth of seven siblings to the second wife of a pearl diver father. After the discovery of oil in Bahrain in 1932, his father joined a rush of former divers to work for Bahrain Petroleum Company. Farid and his eldest sibling suffered congenital sickle cell-beta thalassemia, but he was able to complete his secondary school studies in literature at Al-Hidaya Al-Khalifia Boys' School in 1980. Afterward, he studied air traffic control at the Qatar Aeronautical College and then studied Business Administration at the Gulf College of Technology. Finally, he obtained a diploma in Computer Science and Business Administration from the Bournemouth Center for Computers and Technology in the United Kingdom and the Awal Institute in Bahrain.In addition to working at the Ministry of Finance & National Economy, he worked part-time in the local press until 2003, when he devoted himself full-time to the journalism, literature, radio, television, and cinema. He participated in many forums and conferences, including one on "Photos from the Middle East" in Denmark in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005, and the PEN International Congress in Senegal in 2007. He attended the Cairo International Forum for Arab Fiction Creativity in 2005 and 2015, and participated in many Arab and international film festivals, sometimes as a judge.