The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) announced this week that its 2020 longlist would be released on December 17, 2019:
Next Tuesday, prize organizers are set to announce not only the 16-book longlist, but also the panel of five judges who selected the novels.
The announcement will be made via a press release.
The longlist, they said, will be chosen from among the 128 submissions; eligible submissions were published between July 2018 and June 2019.
Without knowing what’s been nominated, a few of the books that might be expected on the list are:
Najwa Barakat’s Mr. Nuun
Ahmed Awny’s Prizes for Heroes
Hammour Ziada’s Drowning
Shady Lewis Botros’s Ways of the Lord
Khaled Khalifa’s Nobody Prayed Over Their Graves
Jan Dost’s A Green Bus Leaving Aleppo
Ibrahim Abdelmeguid’s The Cyclops
Stella Gaitano’s Souls of Edo
Amal Radwan’s In the Dust Cities
Mohammed Ait Hanna’s The Red Garden
Amr Ezzat’s Room 304
The prize is sponsored by the Department of Culture and Tourism of Abu Dhabi and run with the support of the Booker Prize Foundation in London, hence why the prize is often called the “Arabic Booker.”
