Sheikha Bodour elected EPA president again
sharjah — For the second time, Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, founder and CEO of Kalimat Group, has been selected as the president of Emirates Publishers Association (EPA).
Sheikha Bodour was elected during the EPA’s Sixth General Assembly on Wednesday at the Sharjah Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The session also saw the election of the new board members for 2017-18, and was attended by representatives of the Ministry of Community Development, who supervised the voting process. The biennial election also saw the election of Ali Al Shaali as vice-president, Ali bin Hatem as secretary, Mohammed bin Dukhain as treasurer, and Nooh Al Hammadi as board member of EPA.
Under the tenure of Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi, the EPA has achieved many major milestones, most notably in 2012, for gaining full membership of the International Publishers Association (IPA), one of the world’s most influential publishing associations, and was then elected as the first Arab woman to serve on the Executive Committee.
Her efforts and strong relations with publishers’ associations and unions around the world, helped the EPA to establish itself as a pioneering voice for the growth and development of the publishing industry in the UAE, GCC and wider Middle East.
Sheikha Bodour entered the publishing field in 2007 when she founded Kalimat Publishing, the first Emirati publishing house dedicated to publishing quality Arabic titles for children.
She is alsoi the founder and patron of the UAE Board on Books for Young People and in 2009 she launched the ‘Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature’, the largest and most prestigious children’s literature award in the Arab world.
In 2014, she also launched the ‘Read to Syria’s Children’ initiative to alleviate the suffering of Syrian refugee children, and inaugurated a 3,000-book children’s library, the first of its kind for Syrian refugees.She also heads the organising committee of Knowledge without Borders (KwB), which distributed free home libraries to more than 42,000 Emirati households.
In February 2016, KwB also launched the ‘1001 titles’ initiative under the slogan ‘nurturing talent to enrich content’, which aims to publish 1001 first-edition Emirati titles in 2016-2017, in conjunction with the UAE ‘Year of Reading’.
Due to her tireless work, Sharjah hosted the largest gathering of publishers and literary agencies in the Arab world in November 2015. She was pivotal in presenting the Emirates Reproduction Rights Forum in Sharjah in February 2017
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