Announced in Amman, the six books and their authors shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction are now in contention for a US$50,000 purse and English translation. They represent authors with ties to seven nations.
In a news conference Wednesday (February 21) in Jordan, jurors for the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction have named their six shortlisted authors. The US$50,000 award is to be conferred at Abu Dhabi’s Fairmont Bab Al Bahr on April 24, the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
The honor is an annual literary prize for prose fiction in Arabic, a program run with the support of the Booker Prize Foundation in London and sponsored by the Department of Culture and Tourism in Abu Dhabi.
As Publishing Perspectives reported, last year’s prize went to A Small Death by Mohammed Hasan Alwan. Our interview with Hasan Alwan is here.
A point of pride for the prize’s organizers this year is the presence on the shortlist of two debut novels, The Baghdad Clock and The Critical Case of ‘K’, by the youngest authors who made the longlist, Shahad Al Rawi and Aziz Mohammed.
The Baghdad Clock is the one shortlisted work, already set for publication in English. It’s to be released on May 3 in the UK, according to the publisher’s site, by Oneworld in a translation by Luke Leafgren.
You can read Publishing Perspectives’ coverage of the longlist here.
Shortlisted Authors for the 2018 Prize
- Flowers in Flames by Amir Tag Elsir of Sudan (Dar Al Saqi)
- The Critical Case of ‘K’ by Aziz Mohammed, Saudi Arabia (Dar Tanweer, Lebanon)
- The Second War of the Dog by Ibrahim Nasrallah of Palestine and Jordan (Arab Scientific Publishers)
- Baghdad Clock by Shahad Al Rawi of Iraq (Dar al-Hikma and Oneworld, London)
- Heir of the Tombstones by Walid Shurafa of Palestine (Al Ahlia)
- The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous of Syria (Dar al-Adab)
The last title, Dima Wannous’ The Frightened Ones, is to be published in English by Harvill Secker in 2019, in a translation by Elisabeth Jaquette.
