Egyptian novelist Mohamed Samir Nada has been awarded the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel The Prayer of Anxiety published by the Tunisian publishing house Masciliana, which was announced in Abu Dhabi last week.
Nada has published two previous novels, his debut Mamlaket Melika (Melika’s Kingdom, 2016) and Bouh Al-Godran (Walls’ Whispers, 2021). The winning novel originates from a poem that was then turned into a short story before being worked up into a novel, Nada has said.
The novel is written in a fantasy-reality style and includes the voices of eight characters living in a remote village called Nagei Al-Manassi in Upper Egypt in 1977. The residents of the village believe they are surrounded by minefields and are therefore trapped in the village, and this leads to very limited knowledge of the outside world. However, they know that a war between Egypt and Israel has been taking place since the 1967 June War in the form of the War of Attrition and that Israel is attempting to attack their village as it stands on the first line of defence on the Egyptian border.
The only link the villagers have with the outside world is Khalil Al-Khoja, the owner of a print shop for the local paper who also controls the trade of vital goods into the village and even starts calling people up to take part in the war. After a mysterious object like a satellite falls into the village, an epidemic starts, and a mysterious hand carves the people’s hidden sins onto the village walls in an attempt to cure the residents. A local sheikh then intervenes with a prayer intended to resolve the situation.
Nada is not the only Egyptian novelist to have won the prestigious IPAF Prize. The late Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher received the prize in 2008 for his novel Wahet Al-Ghoroub (Sunset Oasis), and a year later Egyptian novelist Youssef Zeidan was awarded the prize for his novel Azazeel (Beelzebub).
Nada was born in Baghdad to Egyptian parents in 1978, and he spent his childhood in the Iraqi capital where he witnessed the beginnings of the Iraq-Iran War in the 1980s. His family returned to Egypt in 1984 but later relocated to Libya before eventually returning permanently in 1996. Nada graduated from the Faculty of Commerce in Cairo and started his career working in tourism. His father is the late novelist Samir Nada (1938-2013), whose career flourished during the 1960s.
Hammour Ziada, Hadethat Aish Al-Saraya wa Ma Yataalak Beha Min Wakaei Mosaleya (The Aish Al-Saraya Incident and Attendant, Amusing Events), Al-Ain Publishing House, 2025, pp145
In this novella by the popular Sudanese author Hammour Ziada, story revolves around a nameless former leader in the Islamist movement in Sudan, once involved in the circles of power in Khartoum. After a coup d’état that ousted the president affiliated with the Islamist movement, secular calls opposing Islamist governance force the protagonist to flee Khartoum and take refuge with his brother who works at the bank in a remote part of the country. Once there, however, a conflict arises between two women, Al-Haja and Al-Touma, with each claiming to have made the first ever dish of Aish Al-Saraya, a popular dessert, in their city’s history, which the ousted president had tasted during his only visit. Unresolved, the conflict escalates to the point of threatening peace and quiet, generating all manner of amusing events.
Ziada has novels includes Shawq Al-Darwish (The Longing for the Dervish), which received the 2014 Naguib Mahfouz Medal and was nominated for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). In 2019 the Sudanese filmmaker Amjad Abu Alala based his feature film You Will Die at Twenty, which received an award at the Venice Felom Festival, on Hammour Ziada’s short story “Sleeping at the Foot of the Mountain”.
Marwan Al-Ghafouri, Khamas Manazel Lellah wa Ghorfa Li Gedati (Five Houses for God and a Room for My Grandmother), Al-Saqi Publishing House, 2025, pp240
This novel by the Yemeni novelist Marwan Al-Ghafouri spans 19 chapters that can be divided into two parts. In the first part, the protagonist who is a young man recalls his memories of Taiz in the 1990s when political parties and religious movements including the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafis, Sufis and others competed for support. This was a period of confusion and division regarding the meaning of the faith and the practice of religion, unfamiliar to the Yemeni people, among whom a simple, popular faith prevailed, unsegmented by sects and parties as depicted through the words of the young villager. In the second part of the novel, the narrator recalls the illness of his grandmother in the village, enabling her to tell her story against the wishes of the grandfather who has always been trying to stop her from doing so.
Born in 1979 in Taiz, Al-Ghafouri is currently based in Germany. He published two collections of poetry in 2004 and 2006 and a number of novels since his debut, Code Blue, published by Aktob in Cairo in 2008. His latest novel was the 2021 Harb Al-Sheikh Ahmed (Sheikh Ahmed’s War), published by Al-Farabi in Beirut.
Haitham Dabbour, Kaabat Al-Magdheib (Pilgrimage of Madmen), Al-Shorouk Publishing House, 2025, pp410
Photographer Ahmed Al-Bahi receives a mysterious invitation to witness the so called Lesser Pilgrimage in Egypt, and he starts a journey along the Nile to examine the manuscript of an insane man called Al-Imam. The events take place in real places, based on rituals and locations that the author spent four years researching. The novel sheds light on a Sufi journey filled with reflections and existential questions about faith and humanity, with its hero navigating a balance between asceticism and ambition as well as materialism and spirituality, all set in a dramatic framework that infuses realism with magical elements.
Haitham Dabbour is an Egyptian journalist, screenwriter and author. He joined Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper and made numerous documentaries like Tahrir Square: The Good, The Bad, and the Politician. His fiction debut as a screenwriter was Photocopy (2017), which received the Best Arab Feature Award at El Gouna Film Festival (GFF). In 2018, he wrote Eyar Nari (Gunshot), which premiered at GFF and was screened at the Cairo International Film Festival. He also produced and wrote the short film Matelash Aal Hageb (Eyebrows), which won the best short film award at GFF in 2018.
Khaled Azab, Al-Solta wal Emara fi Masr (Power and Architecture in Egypt), Al-Shorouk Publishing House, 2025. pp444
This non-fiction work traces architectural developments and their relations to political power in Egypt through history from the Islamic conquest by Amr Ibn Al-Aass to the era of the Mohamed Ali dynasty. Islamic architecture expert Khaled Azab shows how architecture was not merely about buildings but rather an identity that characterises society, its struggles and intellectual developments. Using images, he also reveals the impact of the Abbasid caliphate on Egypt’s architectural character and how Egyptians sought to establish their own identity, culminating in a unique architectural style that began to emerge during the Mameluk era, reaching its peak with the Mosque and Madrasa of Sultan Hassan. The author explains how Egyptians were influenced by Ottoman architecture too, in buildings such as Al-Gawhara Palace and Shubra Palace, and sheds a light on the Ittihadeya Presidential Palace, which blends Arabic inscriptions on its walls with facade styles inspired by the grandeur of Mameluk architecture.
Noha Dawoud, Dhobaba Zarqaa (A Blue Fly), The Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House, 2025, pp312
In this crime novel set in the beach resort of Dahab, the heroine Nada reports the disappearance of her American friend Emma, and ends up investigating the case with her former boyfriend Assem despite their issues with each other. Fear and tension rise after when previous disappearances that had gone unnoticed are discovered, and rumours of a serial killer on the loose start to spread...
Born in 1975, Noha Dawoud has published eight crime novels including Mashhad Cima (A Cinematic Scene, 2018) and Garima fil Fondok (Crime in a Hotel). Her latest, which appeared last year with the Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House, is Demaa Ala Al-Segada Al-Hamraa (Blood on the Red Carpet).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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