Earlier this week, the Bloomberg news service ran a commentary by George Walden, a British former diplomat who's involved in international literary circles, about a new $50,000 prize that supports fiction-writing in the Arab world.

Walden likened the International Prize for Arab Fiction, which is sponsored by the Emirates capital of Abu Dhabi, to the Man Booker Prize coveted by Western writers. This development is significant, Walden writes, because Arabs have translated only "about 100,000 books over the past millennium; that's almost the average that Spain translate in a year, according to one United Nations report by Arab scholars."

Further, the writer describes the number of non-religious works published in Arabic as "tragically low." Little data are available to support Walden's claim, but I doubt many in the Middle Eastern publishing realm would disagree. On a visit this year to Cairo's popular annual book fair, I noticed that religious titles hogged the limelight and the crowd was dominated by Islamists, with the men sporting bushy beards and cropped galabiyas and the women in flowing black veils that left only their eyes exposed.

This literary void is depressing for a part of the world renowned for the elegance and precision of its language, and volumes of poetry so melodic in Arabic that no translation does them justice. In fairness, many of today's would-be writers are so stifled by their authoritarian governments (think Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, ok, think pretty much the entire region) that their pens are stilled by actual or anticipated censorship.

Societal ills that make for searing, enlightening and engaging novels in the West are taboo topics for many Arab writers, unless they flee and publish in exile. Arab writers who dare to stay in their homelands often face a backlash from religious extremists or state authorities.

In Egypt, for example, Naguib Mahfouz, the only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist zealot in 1994. (He survived, and lived under the protection of bodyguards until his death in 2006.) More recently, there's Alaa al Aswany, Egyptian author of the blockbuster "Yacoubian Building," who told an interviewer that he would "worry about the government much more than extremists." His debut novel, along with his sophomore book "Chicago," have been translated into English.

On the more lowbrow end of the spectrum is the Saudi chick-lit writer Rajaa al Sanea, who in 2005 published  "Girls of Riyadh," a light-as-air romp through the scandalous underground lives of four affluent young Saudi women. (It's available in English.) Saudi Arabia immediately banned her novel, which only helped to propel it to regional bestseller lists. And where is al Sanea now? Chicago.

Abu Dhabi's new fiction prize could help encourage the Middle East's browbeaten authors and draw the kind of international attention that comes in handy when writers are locked up for fiction that edges just a little too close to reality for Arab regimes and fundamentalists.

The contest's first winner was announced this month:  Baha Taher, an Egyptian, for "Sunset Oasis." Part of his prize is the translation and release of his book in English. Finalists included another Egyptian, Mekkaoui Said, for "Swan Song," Jordanian Elias Farkouh for "The Land of Purgatory," Syrian Khaled Khalifa for "In Praise of Hatred," and two Lebanese, Jabbour Douaihy for "June Rain" and May Menassa for "Walking in the Dust." Finalists each receive $10,000.

Good news, yes, but as Walden wrote in his commentary:

"No doubt squalls lie ahead, as this or that mullah or authoritarian regime proscribes this or that winning novel. Yet if stable and open societies are ever to emerge in the Middle East, the key battles must be fought with ideas, and by Arabs themselves. If ever there were a role for the right kind of socially engaged novel, it is here."