Mohammed bin Eid Al Araimi

Mohammed bin Eid Al Araimi, also known as Mohamed Eid Al-Araimi, was an Omani novelist, short-story writer, translator and engineer whose books recorded both the texture of eastern Oman and a life reshaped by disability. He died on Thursday 24 September 2026 at the age of 72. Times of Oman reported his death the same day, remembering a literary career of several decades that produced novels, stories and translations and that earned him recognition from Omani writers' bodies late in life.

He was born in 1954 in Wadi Al Mar (Wadi al-Mur) in the Wilayat of Sur, in what is now South Al Sharqiyah Governorate. His full name was Muhammad Mubarak Khamis Eid Al-Araimi; he published as Mohammed Eid. After Quranic schooling and years of study and work around the Gulf, including Sur, Muscat, al-Khobar, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Doha, he earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering in the United States in 1981. He returned to Oman and joined Petroleum Development Oman as a site engineer at Marmul.

In 1982, while driving toward the oilfields, his car struck a camel at dawn. The collision left him with a spinal cord injury and quadriplegia. After treatment in Oman and intensive rehabilitation in London he returned to PDO, not as a field engineer but as a translator on the company magazine Al Fahal. Unable to hold a pen or type with his fingers, he adapted a leather cuff that fixed a pen to his hand. After roughly two decades of that work he published his first major book, the autobiographical "Taste of Patience" (Madhaq al-Sabr), around the age of 45. Critics in the Gulf and wider Arab world treated it as a rare, frank account of disability, stigma and endurance; it later appeared in English translation.

Fiction followed. His first novel, "Hazz al-Qayd" (Mark of the Chain / Mark of Chain), appeared in 2005. "Bayn al-Sahra wa-al-Ma'a" (Between the Desert and the Sea / Between Desert and Water) followed in 2008, drawing on Gulf and American experience. Later novels included "Hikayat Yunus Hayim" (2014) and "Shahada min Zaman al-Harb" (A Testimony from a Time of War, 2015). He also published the short-story collection "Qaws Qazah" (Rainbow, 2010) and translated George Orwell's "Animal Farm" into Arabic. In 2015 he received Oman's Distinguished Cultural Achievement Award from the "Reading is Light and Insight" initiative; in 2023 the Omani Society for Writers and Authors honoured him again.

Al Araimi lived in Muscat. Public sources describe him as married with a family life begun after he joined PDO, and as a writer who entered literature late yet became a reference point for Omani fiction that holds desert, sea and interior experience together. The cause of his death was not made public. What remains is a shelf of books that turned a catastrophic road accident into a long second vocation of patience, craft and witness.