<span style="color: #222222;">An author from Oman has won the prestigious Man Booker International Prize for "Celestial Bodies", the story of three sisters of a desert country confronting its slave-owning past and a complex modern world.<br />''<br />'' Jokha Alharthi, the first Arabic-language writer to take the prize, will split the 50,000 pounds or 64,000 US dollar purse with her UK-based translator, Marilyn Booth. <br />''<br />''Historian Bettany Hughes, who led the judging panel, said yesterday that the winning novel was "a book to win over the head and the heart in equal measure.<br />''<br />'' "Celestial Bodies" beat five other finalists from Europe and South America, including last year's winner, Poland's Olga Tokarczuk. The prize is a counterpart to the Man Booker Prize for English-language novels and is open to books in any language that has been translated into English.</span><br />