News

IPAF 2025 announces Longlist and Judging Panel

International Prize for Arabic Fiction announces the 2025 Longlist
and the 2025 Judging Panel 

• This year’s longlisted authors are from eight different countries, including four each from Egypt and Syria, three from Lebanon, and one from Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates
• This is the first time that authors from Bahrain and Mauritania feature on the list
• The age range spans 44 years, with the eldest aged 79 and the youngest 35; five women, and eleven men
• Four authors previously longlisted or shortlisted are once more celebrated, the majority are being recognised by the prize for the first time

www.arabicfiction.org | #ArabicFiction2025

The Longlist

Today, 7 January 2025, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), the most prestigious literary prize in the Arab world, has revealed the longlist of 16 novels in contention for the 2025 prize.

The longlist has been chosen from a total of 124 submissions by a panel of five judges chaired by Egyptian academic Mona Baker. Joining her on the panel are Moroccan academic and critic Said Bengrad, Emirati critic and academic Maryam Al Hashimi, Lebanese researcher and academic Bilal Orfali, and Finnish translator Sampsa Peltonen.

The selection includes three authors who have been previously longlisted by IPAF: Rashid al-Daif (2012, 2024), Sausan Jamil Hasan (2023) and Taissier Khalaf (2017), alongside one previously long- and shortlisted author, Azher Jirjees (2020, 2023 respectively). The other twelve authors feature on the list for the first time: Aqeel Almusawi, Inam Bioud, Ahmed Fal Al Din, Jan Dost, Iman Humaydan, Hasan Kamal, Ahmed Al-Malawany, Mohamed Samir Nada, Nadia Najar, Haneen Al-Sayegh, Sumar Shihada and Ayman Ragab Taher.

The full list of 2025 longlisted books, in alphabetical order by author surname, is as follows:

The novels on this year’s longlist take readers from the bustling streets of Lebanon via 1980s Bahrain, to the vibrant city of Oran, Algeria. In some, reality is warped, showcasing a cemetery in Baghdad that turns the dead into butterflies, and a dystopic city where the population are artificially put to sleep. The lives of historical figures – such as Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali and Napolean’s translator Pierre Amédée Jaubert – are reimagined, and history is revisited, with evocative snapshots of life in Syria before the 2011 revolution and during the Morisco period in Andalusia. Societal and familial pressures are explored and interrogated, with some novels tracing the stories of generations against a backdrop of political upheaval. Across the list, a range of perspectives, values and viewpoints convey personal and collective experience.

Mona Baker, Chair of the 2025 judges, said:

“This year’s longlist is remarkable in its diversity of both theme and literary form. Some novels address women’s struggles to achieve their dreams in a patriarchal society that prevents them from living fulfilled lives. Others offer a nuanced portrait of religious and sectarian worlds, where extremism and dogma contrast with human empathy and understanding. There are a number of historical novels on the list which deal with both the recent and more distant past, such as the Abbasid era, or the Inquisition and persecution of Muslims in Andalusia. There are also semi-autobiographical books, and others which read like detective stories. Repressive regimes and their power to crush the hopes and lives of ordinary people are also explored; some novelists paint a stark picture of this reality, while others employ sarcasm and humour, rendering these difficult topics more accessible for the reader.”

Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of Trustees, said:

“This longlist continues the trend of recent years of exploring the past to comment on the present from multiple perspectives. Weaving the personal and generational into narratives that unfold through anxious and troubled times highlights the slow march of social and political change in Arab society. Some of the novels on the list paint a dystopian world in which every avenue is a cul-de-sac. Others reveal the oppressive force of tradition or the principled resistance to wanton attempts at knocking down well-deserved reputations. The diversity of the sixteen writers in age, gender, nationality, places of residence and length of immersion in the literary scene is a testimony to the strength and vitality of modern Arab culture.”

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is an annual literary prize for novels in Arabic, which will award $50,000 to the winner. It is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.

Key Dates:

• The six shortlisted titles will be chosen by the judges and announced on Wednesday 19th February 2025 at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.
• The winner of the prize will be announced on Thursday 24 April 2025 in Abu Dhabi.

Reflecting its mission to increase the international reach of Arabic fiction, 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 ofthe Sky has already been published in Italian (edizione/e) and Greek (Salto) and will be published in Portuguese and Spanish.

2025 also sees the launch of IPAF’s inaugural editing workshop, which aims to develop the skills of professionals in the Arab publishing world and encourage excellence in the industry. It will take place from 18-22 January in Jordan, at the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation. This follows 13 successful iterations of the creative writing workshop, or Nadwa, held in the UAE, Oman and Jordan. This initiative has seen a total of 95 authors develop their work, including Abdelouahab Aissaoui, Mohammed Hasan Alwan and Ahmed Saadawi, who all went on to win the Prize.

The Judging Panel  

Mona Baker (Chair, Egypt) is a university professor and researcher in the field of Translation Studies. She is the director of the Baker Centre for Translation (named after her) at Shanghai International Studies University, China. Two of her best-known works, In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (1992) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (2006), have been translated into Arabic and numerous other languages. She has contributed articles and research to various international journals and has won several prizes honouring her work. These include the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Award for Translation awarded by Saudi Arabia (2011), and the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences Prize in the field of Arts, Languages, Foreign Language Studies and Literature (2015).

Said Bengrad is a Moroccan university professor in the Arts College of Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco. He obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne University, Paris, and a state doctorate from Moulay Ismail University, Meknes, Morocco. He has won numerous prizes, including the Atlas Award for translation, given by the French government (2006), and the Morocco Book Prize (2010). He is a specialist in Semiotics, in its branches of Narrative, Imagery and Culture. His publications include Fictional Narrative and the Experience of Meaning (2008, 2024); The Orbits of Language, between Fuṣḥā Arabic and Dialect (2022); Narrative Identity: the Narrative between Fictional Imagining and History (2023); Interpretation and the Experience of Meaning (2023); and The Image and Outcomes of Looking (2024).

Maryam Al Hashimi is a critic and university academic from the UAE. She is head of the Criticism Club in the Emirati Writers’ Union and has won numerous UAE prizes, including the 2017 Rashid bin Saeed Prize for Outstanding Achievement; the 2019 Al-Owais Award for Creativity (in the category of the best writer from the UAE); and the 2022 Sharjah Award for Gulf Women’s Creativity (first place, in the category of critical studies). She also won the Excellence Award (in the category of scientific studies) from the Indian Al-Nahda magazine in 2021. She is the author of publications on literary criticism and philosophy, including Lament for Cities and Kingdoms between Baghdad and Andalusia: A Study of Saadi Shirazi and Abu Al-Baqa Al-Rundi (2009), The Development of the Poetic Movement in the Emirates: Jama’a al-Hira (2017), The Intellect: Between Talent and Genius (2023), and Narrative Transformations in Emirati Literature: An Artistic Study (2024). She has served on many cultural and literary judging panels, including the 2023 Al-Owais Award (in the literary criticism category), the 2023 Sharjah Book Fair Prize (in the literary creativity category), and the 2023 Sharjah Award for Gulf Women’s Creativity.

Bilal Orfali, a Lebanese researcher and academic, is the Sheikh Zayed Chair of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the American University of Beirut, and Director of the Centre for Arts and Humanities and the university’s publishing house. He specialises in Arabic and Islamic literatures, as well as the Qur'an, Sufism, and narratology. He is editor of various publications: Al-Markaz Journal of Arabic Studies; Al-Abhath Journal; Texts and Studies on the Qur’an; Handbook of Sufi Studies; and the Sheikh Zayed Series for Arabic and Islamic Texts and Studies. He is an associate editor of The Journal of Arabic Literature, published by Brill, and an editor of The Library of Arabic Literature, a project of New York University Abu Dhabi. He serves on the advisory boards of several international journals, book series, and projects in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. He is author and editor of more than two dozen books in Arabic and English.

Sampsa Peltonen is a Finnish translator who works in the fields of literature and media. He studied Foreign Languages at the University of Turku, Finland, and deepened his knowledge of various Arab regions and dialects  through extensive periods spent in the Middle East and North Africa. He has translated novels, short stories, plays and poetry from Arabic and French into Finnish, winning two prestigious Finnish prizes - the WSOY Foundation Prize in 2014 for his translation of Hassan Blasim’s works, and the 2023 Agricola Prize for his translation of Mohammed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men, which won The Goncourt Prize. For his contributions as a language expert, he was appointed member of the National Council for Finnish Language, where he served from 2015-2021. In 2021, he was Chair of the judging panel of the Finlandia Prize, the most important literary prize in Finland. In the field of media, he works as a translator at the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), where he translates documentary films and other media content.     

For further information about the Prize, please visit:

Website www.arabicfiction.org 

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