The shortlist for the ArabLit Story Prize 2021 has been announced today, Wednesday, September 15, 2021.
The ArabLit Story Prize is an award celebrating the best short stories, in any genre, newly translated from Arabic into English founded in 2018 by Arablit.org, a leading resource on Arab literature. Previous winners of the prize have been Egyptian writer Mohammad Abdelnabi and Robin Moger (2018), Najwa Bin Shatwan and Sawad Hussain (2019), and Hadiya Hussein and Shakir Mustafa (2020).
The three judges for 2021 are Layla AlAmmar, a writer and academic from Kuwait; ArabLit’s Morocco and Algeria editor; and Leri Price, an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. The team announced the short stories in the running for the award and they are;
- Rasha Abbas’s “You Can Call Me Velvet” (تستطيع أن تدعوني مخمل), as translated by Katharine Halls
- Karima Ahdad’s “The Baffling Case of the Man Called Ahmet Yilmaz” (الحالة المحيّرة للمدعوّ أحمت يلماز), as translated by Katherine Van De Vate
- Mustafa Taj Alden Almosa’s “How Kind They Are” (كم هم لطفاء), as translated by Maisaa Tanjour & Alice Holttum
- Ahmed Magdy Hammam’s “The Hemingway Man” (خدعة هيمنجواي), as translated by Burnaby Hawkes
- Said Takieddine’s “Camphor Forestland” (غابة الكافور), as translated by Dima El-Mouallem
The award winner will be announced on October 15. All the shortlisted stories will appear in a special section of the Spring 2022 issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
