Shortlist for the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction announced

Gulf Today, Staff Reporter

Danshmand by Ahmed Fal Al Din, The Valley of the Butterflies by Azher Jirjees, The Andalusian Messiah by Taissier Khalaf, The Prayer of Anxiety by Mohamed Samir Nada, The Touch of Light by Nadia Najar, and The Women's Charter by Haneen Al-Sayegh have on been announced on Wednesday as the six shortlisted works for the 18th International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF).

The winner will be announced on Thursday 24 April 2025 in Abu Dhabi. The shortlist was revealed at a press conference at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt by this year’s Chair of Judges, Egyptian academic, Mona Baker. She appeared alongside her fellow judges – Moroccan academic and critic Said Bengrad, Emirati critic and academic Maryam Al Hashimi, Lebanese researcher and academic Bilal Orfali, and Finnish translator Sampsa Peltonen – as well as IPAF’s Chair of Trustees Professor Yasir Suleiman, Prize Administrator Fleur Montanaro, and Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Professor Ahmed Zayed.

The shortlisted authors for IPAF’s 18th edition range in age from 38 to 58 and represent six countries: Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Mauritania, Syria, and UAE. Collectively the authors explore a diverse range of themes through distinct narrative styles and approaches to storytelling.

Four of the shortlisted authors – Ahmed Fal Al Din, Mohamed Samir Nada, Nadia Najar, and Haneen Al-Sayegh - are being recognised for the first time. Azher Jirjees was shortlisted for the Prize in 2023 with The Stone of Happiness after being longlisted in 2020; and Taissier Khalaf was longlisted in 2017 with The Slaughter of the Philosophers. Ahmed Fal Al Din is the first Mauritanian author to be shortlisted in the Prize’s history.

Listed in alphabetical order by author surname, the full 2025 shortlist is as follows:

Author                                     Title                                                     Nationality                        Publisher

Ahmed Fal Al Din                 Danshmand                                           Mauritania                         Masciliana

Azher Jirjees                     The Valley of the Butterflies                     Iraq                                     Dar al-Rafidain

Taissier Khalaf                  The Andalusian Messiah                           Syria                                    Al Mutawassit

Mohamed Samir Nada   The Prayer of Anxiety                               Egypt                                  Masciliana

Nadia Najar                       The Touch of Light                                    UAE                                     Al-Mutawassit

Haneen Al-Sayegh            The Women's Charter                             Lebanon                            Dar al-Adab

Mona Baker, Chair of the 2025 judges, said:“This year’s six shortlisted novels are notable for their focus on the humanity of their protagonists, whether it be a Druze woman in a twenty-first century Lebanese village (The Women’s Charter), or the Islamic cleric Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali in the twelfth century (Danshmand). They depict human journeys, such as that of a young blind woman exploring her four senses in The Touch of Light, and the journey of the Andalusian Issa or Jesús searching for his mother’s killer in The Andalusian Messiah, blending reality and imagination, and mixing tragedy with comedy. In The Valley of the Butterflies, the main character uses sarcasm as a weapon to confront tragic reality; while in The Prayer of Anxiety, the individual figures can also be viewed as political or social symbols, and the novel’s lifelike scenarios can be interpreted on many different levels.

“The judges’ main concern was not subject matter alone. The novel is first and foremost an artistic construction, and narrative representation and its forms are the novelist’s means of creating worlds that can only be achieved through imagination.”

Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of Trustees, said: “This is a shortlist to savour and enjoy for its range of themes, stylistic artistry, diversity of voices and demographic spread. The anthropological framework in some of the novels takes the reader on journeys of discovery in which the narration strays onto less trodden pathways in Arab cultural life. Female characters and family dynamics feature prominently in some of the shortlisted works, revealing at times the slow and tortuous pace of social change. The effects of recent political calamities in the Arab world permeate some of the novels, revealing a dystopian world of loss, social disintegration and searing fears. There is no doubt that this shortlist will appeal to swathes of Arab readers and, when translated, to foreign readers who will find so much to marvel at. The appearance of four new writers on the list, including the first Mauritanian ever, will be a source of pleasure to reading audiences.”

The winner of the 18th International Prize for Arabic Fiction will be announced on Thursday 24 April 2025 at a ceremony in Abu Dhabi that will also be streamed online.

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is awarded for novels in Arabic and each of the six shortlisted finalists receives $10,000, with a further $50,000 going to the winner. It is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.

The aim of IPAF is to reward excellence in contemporary Arabic creative writing and to encourage the readership of high-quality Arabic literature internationally through the translation and publication of winning and shortlisted novels in other major languages. Recent winning IPAF novels which have been published or are forthcoming in English include Mohammed Alnaas’s Bread on Uncle Milad’s Table (winner 2022, anticipated publication in 2026 from HarperVia) and A Mask, the Colour of the Sky (winner 2024, forthcoming from Europa Editions in 2026). A Mask, the Colour of the Sky has already been published in Italian (edizione/e) and Greek (Salto) and will be published in Portuguese and Spanish.