Towfik’s ‘Utopia’ Finalist for 2012 SF&F Translation Awards
Among the “long-form” finalists for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards — for works published in 2011 — is Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik’s engaging Utopia, trans. Chip Rossetti.
Utopia, set in a dystopian Egypt of 2023, which in many ways feels in many ways quite similar to (an exaggerated version) of Egypt 2010: The wealthy live in a secured compound on the Mediterranean while the poor live down in Cairo in polluted, broken-down, hardscrabble conditions. A review by ArabLit visitor Sofia Samatar.
The full list of long-form finalists:
Good Luck, Yukikaze by Chohei Kambayashi, translated from the Japanese by Neil Nadelman (Haikasoru)
Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, translated from the Arabic by Chip Rossetti (Bloomsbury Qatar)
The Dragon Arcana by Pierre Pevel, translated from the French by Tom Clegg (Gollancz)
Midnight Palace by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (Little, Brown & Company)
Zero by Huang Fan, translated from the Chinese by John Balcom (Columbia University Press)
The winning works will be announced at the 2012 Finncon on the weekend of July 21-22. Each winning author and translator will receive a cash prize of US$350.
More at the SFFT Awards website.
The State of Arabic Science Fiction (in Translation) | Arabic Literature (in English)
June 7, 2012 @ 6:35 am
[…] published by a forward-thinking BQFP. This year, the book is a finalist for the English-language Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award. But outside of Utopia, there’s been little spec fic that’s crossed the line from […]