Today: Announcement of Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature

At 6 p.m.* Cairo time, the winner of the 2014 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature will be made public:

This year’s judging committee was made up of Tahia Abdel Nasser, Shereen Abouelnaga, Mona Tolba, Humphrey Davies, and Rasheed El-Enany. The awards ceremony, as usual, will be held at the American University in Cairo’s downtown Oriental Hall.

Last year’s winner was Khaled Khalifa’s No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which was also shortlisted for the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). It has not yet been translated into English.

At the 2013 ceremony, AUC Press showcased the translation of the previous year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal winner, Ezzat El-Kamhawi’s multigenerational novel House of the Wolf, which had recently come out in translation by Nancy Roberts.

Other previous winners include Bensalem Himmich’s ground-breaking The Polymath, Hoda Barakat’s beautiful The Tiller of Waters, Mourid Barghouti’s moving I Saw Ramallah, among others. Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 2010, was also shortlisted for the IPAF.

The award, announced each year on Mahfouz’s birthday, was first given in 1996.

Naguib Mahfouz Medal winners receive the medal and a $1,000 prize. They’re also offered a contract for translation with AUC Press.

*That’s 11 a.m. EST, 4 p.m. for those of you on GMT, 5 p.m. for the Italians, still 6 p.m. for Jordanians, 7 p.m. for Saudi readers, and 8 p.m. in the Emirates.