Since its conception nearly twenty years ago, the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has sought to bring a wider scope of attention and celebration to works translated into English from the Arabic, resulting in a plethora of incredible titles being honored over the years, from the 2008 awarding of Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, translated by Fady Joudah, to the 2019 awarding of Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work, translated by Leri Price. In this essay, Ibrahim Fawzy takes us across the most recent shortlist and its six works, discussing their distinct contributions to the Arab world’s abundant archive.
Contemporary Arabic literature offers rich, varied responses to the shared human experiences of displacement, conflict, and the weight of history. With its compelling and diverse array, the shortlist of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation presents a brilliant selection of such works each year, spanning genres from memoir to thriller, and reflecting the vitality and range of modern Arabic literary expression. In the 2024 prize, the six works on the shortlist—brought into English by dedicated translators—offer profound insights into the complexities of identity, memory, and resilience. While the judges ultimately awarded the prize to Katharine Halls’s translation of Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence early this year, every shortlisted text invited comparative reflection on how these distinct narratives converge around the very act of bearing witness.