On Thursday, 9 April, the IPAF board met online as the in-person meeting in Abu Dhabi was cancelled due to the US-Israel war on Iran. The jury announced I Resist the River's Course (Oghaleb Magra Al-Nahr) by Algerian novelist Saiid Khatibi as the winning work for 2026.
In 2017, Khatibi was short-listed for the IPAF with his novel Firewood of Sarajevo (Hatab Sarajevo). The 1984-born Algerian novelist's other works include Forty Years in Waiting for Isabelle (Arbo’un Aaman fi Intezar Isabelle) and The End of the Sahara (Nehayat al-Sahara), published in 2016 and 2022.
Khatibi writes both in Arabic and French. History and bewildering realities are two key themes in his writings.
Published by Hachette Antoine/Naufel, Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course is set in Boussada, the author’s city of birth, with events unfolding in the 1990s during the Dark Decade. However, the main line of the novel focuses on an investigation into the killing of a forensic pathologist, with his wife, a prominent ophthalmologist, as the accused. As the investigation unfolds, the author invokes the history of Algeria from the post-World War II years up to the Algerian War of Independence.
The investigation of the crime is only an introduction to a critical scrutiny of the modern and contemporary history of Algeria, with a parallel line in which the history of the father of the accused wife and his role in the war of independence are called into question, just as the investigation of the killing reveals the hidden story of the deceased forensic pathologist.
On the two parallel tracks, Khatibi is digging deep into the ailment of a society that tends to either over-idealize or over-demonize. Khatibi himself is not trying to make his protagonists come across either as fallen heroes or redeeming villains.
They are just people who were faced with devastation and who were trying to find a way out; the daughter by killing the violent and opportunist husband, and the father by having an affair with a woman in the midst of accusations of his failure to live up to the expectations of his comrades in the war of independence.
I Resist the River’s Course is not designed to talk about good versus evil but rather about the inevitable intertwining of good and evil.
A version of this article was published in Al-Ahram Al-Arabi.
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