This week, our editors fill us in on the controversial withholding of a young writers short story prize in Egypt and an exciting new Canadian-led digital humanities initiative. Read on to find out more!
Ibrahim Fawzy, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Egypt
The announcement of the winners of the twenty-first edition of Egypt’s Sawiris Cultural Awards was quickly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the jury’s decision to withhold the first prize in the Best Short Story Collection (young writers category). This decision became a public cultural reckoning, reigniting long-simmering questions about literary authority, generational tension, and the role of prizes in a precarious literary ecosystem.
At the center of the controversy were remarks made by the chair of the jury member Gerges Shoukry, an Egyptian writer and poet, during the awards ceremony. Explaining the decision to withhold the prize, Shoukry stated that “the overwhelming majority of submitted texts lacked the basic principles of the short story,” framing the jury’s decision as a message to young writers that “knowledge is the path to excellence.”
The backlash was swift. On social media, writers emphasized that juries have the right to withhold prizes; what they rejected was the tone of “generalization,” “rebuke,” and “moral instruction” that accompanied the decision. Questions also emerged about the jury’s process: if most submissions were deemed so fundamentally flawed, how did four short story collections make it to the shortlist in the first place? The collections in question were Pet Mice by Nesma Ouda, Violent Love by Hoda Omran, A Distance Fit for Betrayal by Noha El-Shazly, and Death Has Three Knocks by Iman Abu Ghazala. For the writers, the announcement felt less like a neutral judgment and more like a public invalidation of their efforts.
In response to calls for accountability, Shoukry issued a clarification. He framed the jury’s decision as a choice between awarding prizes regardless of merit or “hav[ing[ the courage to tell the truth.” The jury, he argued, chose the more difficult path.
The controversy reopened a long-standing anxiety in Egyptian literary life: Is short story being sidelined in favor of the novel? Are younger writers—especially those experimenting with form—being judged according to rigid or outdated criteria? At its core, the debate raises a fundamental question: where does evaluation end and guardianship begin? Literary juries are entrusted with judgment, not instruction; with selection, not correction. When critique adopts a reprimanding tone, it risks alienating the very writers it claims to guide.
MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Canada
De code et de plomb (Of Code and Lead) is a transatlantic collection at the crossroads of print culture and digital humanities, directed by Margot Mellet (Université de Sherbrooke) and issued by the Presses universitaires de Rouen et du Havre (PURH). Drawing on research and publishing technologies developed by the Canada Research Chair in Digital Writing (at Université de Montreal) in concurrence with the Chair in Excellence in Digital Publishing (at Université de Rouen Normandie), it foregrounds the material and collaborative realities of digital writing. The series title, De code et de plomb, evokes both digital code and traditional lead type, and the Pressoir platform the series is built on, playfully named after a wine press, makes editorial processes visible and embodies the collection’s neomaterialist critique of the notion that digital publishing or even the digital as such is immaterial, invisible, or purely “fluid.”
This attitude is exemplified in the recent inaugural release, C’est la matière qui pense. Pour une philosophie de l’édition (It Is Matter That Thinks: Toward a Philosophy of Publishing) by Marcello Vitali‑Rosati—the eminent holder of both above-mentioned Chairs—in which he argues that thought and meaning do not originate solely in a human subject but emerge from the interactions between material formats, tools, and editorial practices, challenging traditional ideas of immaterial thinking and underscoring how materiality produces sense in the digital age. I was delighted to read a rare kind of book: a captivating and at times exhilarating—erudite and sophisticated!—work where (reader-friendly) quotations in Ancient Greek from Plato or Homer are spiced up with insider trivia, such as anecdotes about how small material accidents contributed to major scientific discoveries.
Margot Mellet, who wrote an equally insightful preface to Vitali-Rosati’s book, also recently announced the forthcoming release, La circulation des images. Comprendre la fabrique médiatique des souvenirs visuels (The Circulation of Images. Understanding the Media Construction of Visual Memories) by Matteo Treleani, due to release soon.
*****
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