7 Finalists for the 2019 Prix de la Littérature Arabe
The seven finalists for the Prix de la Littérature Arabe — a Francophone award that celebrates books written by Arabs in French or translated from Arabic to French — was announced today:
The finalists include two novels translated from Arabic:
- La Chambre de l’araignée (translated from Arabic by Gilles Gauthier) by Mohammed Abdelnabi (Actes Sud), also available in Jonathan Wright’s English translation as In the Spider’s Room (Hoopoe)
- Les petits de Décembre (December’s Children) by Kaouther Adimi (Seuil)
- Ougarit by Camille Ammoun (Incultes)
- Le Ciel sous nos pas (Heaven Beneath our Feet) by Leïla Bahsaïn (Albin Michel)
- Égypte 51 by Yasmine Khlat (Elyzad)
- Port-au-Prince Aller-Retour (Port-au-Prince Round Trip) by Georgia Makhlouf (La Cheminante)
- Ceux qui ont peur (traduit de l’arabe par François Zabbal) de Dima Wannous (Gallimard); set to be available next year in English, in Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation, as The Frightened Ones (Harvill Secker)
Winning authors receive a 10,000 euro prize.
As in the past, the jury is set to meet this fall, led by judging chair Pierre Leroy. The prize will be presented at the Institut Arabe on November 6, 2019.
Since its creation in 2013, Prix de la Littérature Arabe has gone to Jabbour Douaihy (2013), Mohamed al-Fakharany (2014), Mohammed Hasan Alwan (2015), Inaam Kachachi (2016), and Sinan Antoon (2017) for his novel The Pomegranate Alone, which was translated into English as The Corpse Washer. Last year’s prize went to Omar Robert Hamilton (2018) for his novel The City Always Wins, translated by Sarah Gurcel as La Ville gagne toujours.