This week, our editors report on a busy literary season, filling us in on awards to watch for, considering the politics of prizes, and reporting on exciting literary festivals. Read on to find out more!
Kathryn Raver, Assistant Managing Editor, reporting from France
The French literary awards season is upon us! Over the course of the last few weeks, the juries of prizes such as the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis have announced their shortlists and/or laureates. Though the Goncourt is arguably the most well-known and prestigious of France’s literary awards, there are countless others awarded each year, from those awarded by the Académie Française to those given by individual bookshops, each of them celebrating Francophone and world literature in their own way.
Les Deux Magots, a well-renowned Parisian literary café with 140 years of history behind it, awarded its 92nd yearly prize last week to Swiss author Joseph Incardona for his recent novel Le monde est fatigué. The novel follows a young woman who acts as a mermaid at aquariums, but whose fake tail hides a body damaged by a grievous accident for which she is determined to seek revenge. Le monde est fatigué has also been longlisted for the Prix Femina, alongside works by other celebrated Francophone authors such as Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Au grand jamais and Nathacha Appanah’s La nuit au cœur. The prize’s shortlist is set to be announced on October 21st, with the winner announced November 3rd.
The prize that I, personally, am watching most closely is the Prix Décembre, which defines itself as a sort of “anti-Goncourt”. The longlist includes works such as Laura Vazquez’s Les Forces (whose poetry appeared in Asymptote’s October 2022 edition) and the newest novel of Wendy Delorme (whose work was recently translated and featured in one of Asymptote’s Translation Tuesday columns). Last year, the Prix Décembre went to Moroccan author Abdellah Taïa, a past laureate of PEN America’s Literary Translation Award who has also appeared in several of Asymptote’s past issues. The laureate is set to be announced on October 28th.
Shatha Abd El Latif, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Palestine
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, the off-spring translation Award of Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, has recently announced the entries for this year’s round, composed of 17 titles across multiple genres, from the prison-born, autofictional prose of Sonallah Ibrahim, set in the Nasser-ruled Egypt of the 1970s, to Bothayna Al-Essa’s madcap publishing dystopia centered on a government-run book censorship movement and based on Al-Essa’s experience in the Gulf’s publishing and cultural landscape.
The Banipal Trust also announced the new panel of judges for 2025, made up of Cambridge professor of Arabic literature Dr Christina Phillips, Dr Susan F Frenk from Durham University, translator and writer Nashwa Nasreldin, and finally, former Booker Prize judge Boyd Tonkin. Since 2006, the Banipal Translation Prize has been awarded to a work of translation, from Arabic to English, in the spirit of celebrating “published translation in English a full-length imaginative and creative Arabic work of literary merit”. The prize, then, envisions for itself a worldly mission of promoting a literary and cultural dialogue, moderated via the currency of translation, a linguistic transaction that, for Banipal, promises the delivery of the literary heritage of the modern Arab world (a term that is riddled with contested literary and national meanings), to a multilingual and multicultural readership in the United Kingdom, the Prize’s homeland, and the rest of the globe.
Certainly, Banipal’s celebration of the literary economy of translated literatures is symptomatic of a wider regional and global waltzing with the cultural production of the ‘Arab world’ through translation-powered circulation. The Banipal Prize, then, can be a literary pedestal from which we can make a prophetic judgement as to what the contemporary literary landscape conceives of as literature that is ‘Arab,’ of literary worth and, surely, of good enough economic prospects to make it to the final cut. The prize vows to build the economic and literary infrastructure of a worldly vision of Arabic literature; whether it does so or not, it has indeed become a centrifugal literary stage that begets many, many questions about translation and the worldliness of Arabic literature.
Wambua Muindi, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Kenya
On October 10th and 11th, the inaugural Nanyuki Book Festival was held at Braeburn Nanyuki International School. Nanyuki’s Books and Bloom bookshop and library, founded by Rose Akoth, organised the event. The two-day festival was headlined by keynote speeches from Anne Miltenberg and Peter Kimani, author of Dance of the Jacaranda. In attendance were authors Eunniah Mbabazi, Verah Omwocha, Munira Hussein and Kelvin Kimuyu, among others. There were performances, book readings, kids’ activities, exhibitions, and panel discussions that sought to bring together Nanyuki to celebrate books, culture, and community. The festival coincided with Mazingira Day, a Kenyan national holiday that celebrates the environment and its protection for future generations. Fittingly, the festival was held in a town that is the gateway to Mount Kenya and the Mount Kenya National Park, and to observe this, the festival included a presentation on the environment and tree planting activities in collaboration with a Nanyuki-based tree nursery.
In other literary news outside Nairobi, the Kistrech International Poetry Festival will take place from October 16th through October 23rd in Kisii County. Founded in 2013 by Christopher Okemwa, who teaches at Kisii University, the festival has sought to promote poetry and cultural exchange between Africa and the rest of the world over the years. This year’s edition is the eleventh and is themed ‘Poetry and Performance.’ It will feature poetry readings and performances, spoken word, and songs across different venues in Kisii town. Local poets who will grace the festival with poems in Ekegusii, the language spoken by the Abagusii, include Alfred Nyakage Nyamwange and Gesura Mecha, the poets behind poems like ‘Torende Obwoamate’ and ‘Mosaiga Agaacha Egesa,’ respectively. The festival will feature poets from Barbados, Iraq, Finland, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, United States, Switzerland, and Kenya.
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