ARABIC LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION

One of the great benefits of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, the most important literary prize in the Arab world, is that the winning book is guaranteed translation into English. Just two years after Hoda Barakat won the prize for Voices of the Lost, Marilyn Booth’s translation will hit bookshelves in March. But there are promising signs that other authors recognised by IPAF are gaining international attention, too—Arab fiction in translation in 2021 is something of a greatest hits of the prize’s longlist stretching back a decade. 

Voices of the Lost had been acquired by UK publisher Oneworld even before Barakat took home the $50,000 prize, a testament to the audience the Lebanese author can command. The book is a dark, unflinching examination of people on the margins of society. A series of anonymous letters detail lives adrift, the stories of migrants, exiles and wanderers looking for their place in the world. 

It is perhaps more encouraging that Yassin Adnan’s 2016 debut Hot Maroc will be published in English in May—comic Arab novels in translation are disappointingly rare. Adnan’s exploration of Marrakech’s digital underworld rightly made the IPAF longlist in 2017, the exposure it enjoyed surely set a path to translation for this close-to-the knuckle and bitingly satirical take on the way young people navigate the early decades of 21st-century Morocco. The translation by Alexander E. Elinson, released five years later, remains fascinatingly current.

Staying with contemporary issues, Saudi author Aziz Mohammed caused quite a stir when he tackled modern Arab life in his debut, The Critical Case of a Man Called K, which made the IPAF shortlist in 2018. After reading Kafka, the man called K is inspired to write his own diary and, though initially concerned about his dull existence, a life-changing diagnosis changes his outlook. Translator Humphrey Davies finds just the right balance between sensitivity and dark humour in a book that will be published in April by Hoopoe, and which—perhaps suitably—Mohammed has likened in tone to Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid. 

April will also finally bring the English translation of Jana Fawaz Elhassan’s All the Women Inside Me. The book was shortlisted by IPAF back in 2013—some indication of the prize’s growing influence on interest in Arab authors’ back catalogues (Elhassan was also shortlisted in 2015 for The Ninety-Ninth Floor, which was translated into English in 2016). All the Women Inside Me is a profound portrait of Sahar—a woman who struggles with loss, loneliness and oppression—and is undoubtedly a harrowing read. But there is hope to be found in imagination and friendship—which ultimately powers this important book, translated by Michelle Hartman, to its gripping conclusion. 

Sahar Khalifeh is another author belatedly benefiting from the burgeoning interest in Arab fiction. Her second novel to be translated into English inside a year, this time by Aida Barnia, My First and Only Love explores Palestinian history—in particular the final days of the British mandate—from the poetic viewpoint of Nidal. It’s wonderful to see this great Palestinian writer, 80 this year and a former IPAF chair of judges, finally enjoying global recognition following her own IPAF shortlisting in 2010 for Origin and Branch. This translation is released in March.

Finally, a book which somehow slipped under the radar of IPAF judges, Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping. The first of this Egyptian author’s excellent novels to be translated into English, Slipping sees struggling journalist Seif immerse himself into a fantastical exploration of Alexandria, which in turn leads him to dig deeper into the mysteries of his own past. The novel, translated by Robin Moger, neatly lays out the contradictions and the traumas of the Arab Spring.