A shortlist of six novels has been named for the 16th International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Each of the authors gets $10,000, with the winner – to be announced in Abu Dhabi on 21 May – receiving an additional $50,000.
There were a total of 124 submissions for this year’s prize.
The shortlisted authors come from six different countries, address a variety of themes (all “vital and timely”, says the press release), and represent an equal gender split. Two have been shortlisted before: Najwa Binshatwan (in 2017 for The Slave Yards) and Miral al-Tahawy (in 2011 for Brooklyn Heights). A third, Azher Jirjees, has previously appeared on a longlist.
In fact the novels do seem to share at least a common viewpoint. Prof Yasir Suleiman, chair of the Board of Trustees, said the shortlisted novels “excavate the themes of marginality, alienation and dispersal in Arab life from different vantage points” – in some cases that means nostalgia for the past, in others it’s “the brutality of a failed political and social order”.
He noted the authors’ depiction of “the ethnic richness and cultural diversity of Arab social life” and commended “the emergence of new voices and a strong gender mix”. The judges said they felt that this multiplicity of voices and idiom, with contrasting styles, structure and narrative forms, “offers a dynamic snapshot of the contemporary Arabic novel”.
The chair of the 2023 Judges, Moroccan writer and novelist Mohammed Achaari, added “the scope of the 2023 shortlisted novels is vibrant and varied” and helpfully provided some comments on them:
Fatima Abdulhamid (Saudi Arabia) The Farthest Horizon –“charts the terrors of death, and of love, and their constant intersections”. Abdulhamid’s interview on the IPAF website says “I imagined that eternal foe called death, gradually approaching, stopping after every step and in a deep emotionless voice, defending himself, explaining that which he can see and we cannot …”
Al-Sadiq Haj Ahmed (Algeria) Drought – “transports us to the world of the Sahara between southern Algeria and northern Mali, where drought, famine and tribalism mirror the brutal and fragile nature of the desert”. It’s a novel of the Tuareg, who fled their lands in the north of Mali after the 1973 drought and headed to refugee camps in southern Algeria and Libya. They were used by Gaddafi in wars in Chad and Lebanon in exchange for a promise of an independent state in Mali, a promise that would never be fulfilled …
Zahran Alqasmi (Oman) The Exile of the Water Diviner – “focuses on water and its symbolism in the collective memory”. The novel is steeped in the history of the aflaj, the irrigation systems which are inextricably linked to village life in Oman …
Najwa Binshatwan (Libya) Concerto Qurina Eduardo – “an intimate portrait of human struggle in the face of injustice and political despotism, where the hell of the present seems only to signal a hellish future”. It’s a coming-of-age novel about a young girl in Libya, her extended family, and how their lives are affected by politics and war …
Azher Jirjees (Iraq) The Stone of Happiness – “shines a light on how children and the weak bear the burden of society disintegrating after war and sectarian struggles”. If the brief translation we read is anything to go by, Jirjees’ second novel exhibits the same kind of dry, bleak humour as his first; it opens with the narrator’s assassination by a hitman and flashes back to his childhood in Baghdad …
Miral al-Tahawy (Egypt) Days of the Shining Sun – “explores migration and upheaval, through people trapped between the hardships of their places of origin and the violence of their places of exile”. It’s about the marginalised, the dispossessed and the rootless, taking place in a smell town on the southern border of the USA where the illegal smuggling of workers and immigrants is the norm …
The IPAF is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, part of DCT Abu Dhabi.
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