The 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation will be awarded in London in February, with this year’s Prize, the 20th, going to UK academic Marilyn Booth’s translation of Omani writer Zahran Alqasmi’s novel Honey Hunger.
The novel was originally published in Arabic as Jaw al-asal in 2017, and Booth’s translation was published by the AUC Press in Cairo under its Hoopoe imprint early last year. The translator is awarded a Prize worth £3,000.
While congratulations are due to this year’s winning author and translator, as always with the Banipal Prize the shortlisted works also make up a useful cross-section of some of the most notable translations of contemporary Arabic literature to be published in English in the past year.
Under the Prize’s guidelines, publishers are asked to submit full-length English-language translations of works published in Arabic after 1967 that appeared in the previous year. The 2025 Prize was judged by a panel chaired by Tina Phillipps, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at Cambridge University in the UK, and the shortlist, announced late last year, included works by Egyptian and Palestinian authors as well as authors from the Gulf.
Unlike in previous years, there were no works from the Maghreb countries shortlisted for the 2025 Prize or from Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, or Iraq. While four of the shortlisted works are by male authors, almost all the translators – five out of six – are women, indicating that while women authors may have taken a back seat among those vying for this year’s Prize, this is certainly not true of their translators.
In addition to Booth, also translator of Omani author Jokha Alharthi’s novel Celestial Bodies which won the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, the list also includes Sawad Hussain, shortlisted for her translation of South Sudanese writer Stella Gaitano’s novel Edo’s Souls for last year’s Banipal Prize, and Kay Heikkinen, whose translation of Palestinian author Huzama Habayeb’s novel Velvet won the 2020 Banipal Prize.
There are two novels by Egyptian writers on this year’s shortlist. The first is a complete translation of late Egyptian author Radwa Ashour’s trilogy of novels on mediaeval Islamic Spain, collectively called Granada, translated by Heikkinen and published by AUC Press, and the second is On the Greenwich Line (Ala khat grinitsch) by Shady Lewis (Shady Lewis Butros) translated by Katharine Halls. These are works that could hardly be more different, but both caught the attention of the judges this year.
For many years Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Ashour will be well known to many readers not only for her work in literary criticism but also in politics where she was associated with a range of political positions. Her Granada trilogy (Thulathiyat Ghirnata) was published in Arabic in 1994, and the first part was translated into English by William Granara in 2003.
Several other of Ashour’s novels are also available in English translation, among them The Woman from Tantoura, also translated by Heikkinen, Spectres, Blue Lorries, and Siraaj. Ashour’s memoir of her years spent as a student in the US is also available in English (The Journey). Heikkinen’s translation of Granada is the first complete translation of the trilogy, and it allows readers to appreciate the shape of the work as a whole.
The first volume, Granada, also the longest, recounts the aftermath of the surrender of the southern Spanish city of Granada, until 1492 under Arab Muslim rule, to Christian forces as part of the Reconquista, the unification of the peninsula under the rule of the Catholic monarchs King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The subsequent volumes, Maryama and Departure, trace the consequences of the surrender over time, showing how the promises made by the city’s new rulers are swiftly forgotten and its Arab identity erased.
“They lived each day, finding no consolation in the treaty’s provisions guaranteeing their rights to trade, worship, and live their lives as they were accustomed to,” the narrator says of the Arab population of Granada, now under Spanish Christian rule. “They watched the mass emigration of the nobles, the prominent, and the rich. It was a tumult, a fevered face of buying and selling, where everything was being sold and everything could be bought – houses, gardens, estates, manuscripts, swords inherited from grandfathers and grandfathers’ grandfathers.”
Worse is to come with the deliberate destruction of the area’s Arab and Muslim heritage by the victorious Spanish forces, with property confiscated and books burned, soldiers spreading out “among the books and [setting] fire to them, retreating afterwards at a run to avoid the flames which had begun to spread horizontally as they rose into the air.” The last volume of the trilogy ends with an expulsion decree, “the usual preface about the treachery of the Arabs” introducing an order that the Arab population must “leave within three days for the designated ports, with death as the penalty for any who disobeyed.”
On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis published by the small UK publisher Peirene Press appeared in Arabic in 2019 from Dar Al-Ain in Cairo. The Greenwich Line of the title is the Greenwich Meridian, the international dateline which passes through London, and On the Greenwich Line recounts the experiences of its narrator in the British capital.
He works in a social services department dealing with housing applications, including from asylum-seekers. Some of the material may be autobiographical as Lewis himself works for social services in London. His problems, as the narrator sees them in his novel, stem from the fact that there is no social housing available because of government cutbacks, and so he spends his time observing the bureaucracy in which he works instead.
Like bureaucracy everywhere, this invents tasks to fill the time, and in the absence of any social housing to allocate the narrator sends out memoranda, files reports, writes up case histories, and engages in endless administrative tasks, the joke being that there is nothing, or nothing much, to administer.
Palestinian writing: Two titles on this year’s shortlist are by Palestinian writers – The Tale of a Wall by Nasser Abu Srour and Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah.
Abu Srour’s book is a set of meditations, each a handful of pages in length, on his experience in Israeli prisons, where he has been held since 1993. Translated by US academic Luke Leafgren, the book was first published in English by the Other Press in the United States and has more recently been picked up internationally by Penguin. It was published in Arabic as Hikayat jidar by Dar Al-Adab in Beirut in 2022. It is the only book on the Banipal Prize shortlist this year to be published by a major international publisher, perhaps reflecting the urgency of the material.
The Tale of a Wall is also the only book on the shortlist to have received an introduction by its translator, with Leafgren writing that “to make the text as engaging and readable as possible, the syntax and punctuation became somewhat more direct in places than I found them in the Arabic… leaving out a number of examples, abbreviating or deleting certain sentences, and removing paragraphs we felt were less essential.”
Abu Srour’s meditations could be read within the context of prison literature, works like East of the Mediterranean by the Saudi novelist Abdel-Rahman Mounif or The Smell of It by the late Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim, where the language of the books is flattened out or numbed as a way of rendering the dehumanisation of the prison experience. Perhaps there is something similar happening in Abu Srour’s meditations, emerging from the darkness of his 30 years spent in prison and bearing the marks, in the sometimes contorted expression, of that experience.
Khalifah’s Sand-Catcher, translated by Barbara Romaine and published by the small Coffee House Press in the US, was first published as Qabid al-raml by Dar al-Ahliya in Jordan in 2020. Khalifah is an academic at Georgetown University in Qatar, where his work focuses on contemporary Arab and Middle Eastern history. Sand-Catcher, on the other hand, his first novel, seems to take a rather sceptical attitude towards some of the ways in which that history has been presented, at least in the mainstream media.
Four journalists, all in their thirties and working for a newspaper in Amman, decide to interview the “last living member” of one of their families, now aged 85 and living in sheltered housing in the Jordanian capital, about his memories of the Nakba, the expulsion of some 700,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine during the 1948 foundation of Israel.
“We sat for a long time thinking about what sort of questions we should ask the old man. It had taken us weeks to get the family to agree for one reason or another – the old man was sick, say, or they were too busy… At one point, Khaa’in [a member of the group] suggested we just forget the whole thing. Then we could turn to some more newsworthy topic,” the narrator of the first section of the novel says, before concluding that for him at least it was important to go through with it.
However, the interview does not go to plan, despite their preparation. The old man, never named, sits silently through their questions, before angrily telling the group to “get the hell out of here!” According to his grandson, narrator of the novel’s second section, “this [interview] was the last thing my grandfather needed at the end of his life… I looked the reporters over: two young men and two young women in their mid-thirties at most. They resembled the elegantly well-groomed couples in movies.”
Whether for that reason or for some other, his grandfather refuses to answer their questions. Perhaps the novel is inviting readers to think about the way Palestinian history has been packaged to serve different agendas, or perhaps it is setting the experience of the older generations, marked by exile and dispossession, to the more secure existence of at least some members of the younger.
Winning novel: There are two novels from the Gulf this year, one of them, Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi, the winner of the 2025 Prize.
The other novel, The Guardian of Surfaces by Kuwaiti writer Bothayna Al-Essa, was first published in Arabic by Takween in Kuwait as Haris sath al-alam, literally “guardian of the surface of the world,” in 2019. It has been translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain for small UK publisher Selkies House, with the English version appearing in 2024.
The Guardian of Surfaces describes a dystopian world, apparently a little like that presented by UK writer George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which freedom of expression is strictly controlled and all forms of publication subject to state censorship.
The “guardian” of the title is employed by the government of the state concerned – a “place like any other” – to vet publications according to a strictly enforced “manual of correct reading.” This entails the eradication of any suggestiveness or imagination, with language, like every other aspect of this society, being confined to “surfaces,” apparently to prevent minds from asking questions or wandering.
Literature is a particular offender for the guardian of Al-Essa’s novel, as it is for the censors in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the official language of the society, “newspeak,” is also the language of the media. In The Guardian of Surfaces, the reading manual asks the guardians to guard against any mention of sex, politics, or religion. “A thing is what it is,” it says. “A word means itself, and every word has only one meaning.”
Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger is a welcome escape from this two-dimensional world, seeming at first to be a disquisition on bee-keeping – probably an occupation proscribed by the unforgiving authors of the manual of correct reading. Set in the desert regions of Oman, the novel follows the fortunes of Azzan, a solitary beekeeper who moves his hives from the country’s White Mountains to the remote region of Juba. It is here that he encounters various Bedouin tribes.
What comes through most keenly in this atmospheric novel is the sense of space in the vast desert of Oman together with its relation to the miniature world of the bees. “Staring into the horizon, he would notice how the sky took on many colours in the blaze of hard light that flared before sundown,” the narrator says of Azzan, contrasting this to “how attached he had become to these tiny creatures” – the bees – “who captured almost all of his time and attention.”
n its evocation of vast empty spaces and their human and other inhabitants, Alqasim’s winning novel provides a contrast to the urban bustle of London or Amman, as described by Lewis and Khalifah, as well as to the historical, dystopian, or carceral spaces described in other novels on this year’s shortlist.
It extends the territory of the Arabic eco-novel from the North African desert described by the Libyan writer Ibrahim Al-Koni, whose novels may be similar to this work by Alqasim, to the deserts of the Arabian Gulf and Oman.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 29 January, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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