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Khadija Marouazi’s ‘History of Ash,’ Alawiya Sobh’s ‘This Thing Called Love’ Shortlisted for EBRD Prize

MARCH 19, 2024 — Organizers today announced the shortlist of the 2024 EBRD Literature Prize. The annual prize has somewhat unusual criteria, in that they award translated literary fiction from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD)’s countries of operation. This year’s ten-book shortlist includes two novels translated from Arabic, from Morocco and Lebanon, as well as novels translated from Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Russian, Romanian, Croatian, and Czech. 

The two Arabic novels shortlisted for the €20,000 award are: History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi, translated by Alexander E. Elinson, and This Thing Called Love by Alawiya Sobh, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss.

The shortlist — which includes both novels and short-story collections — was selected by judges Maya Jaggi (chair), Maureen Freely, and Philippe Sands.

In a prepared statement, Jaggi said:

“Our shortlist is testimony to the vigour, inventiveness and imaginative breadth of fiction emerging from often troubled regions of the world. From the lyric to the epic, the picaresque to the carnivalesque, these books swept us from Moroccan dungeons and the snowy Turkish mountains to encounters with a Czech theatre troupe on the run and ageing Ukrainian rockers innocently unaware of the cataclysm to come. We found humour in abundance, tenderness and always a stubborn insistence on memory. Among the persistent themes were the psychological scars of authoritarianism, a Europe marred by erupting xenophobia, trepidation at Russian expansionism long before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the sullen resentments and quiet rapprochements between fathers and sons.”

The full shortlist:

The End by Attila Bartis, translated from the Hungarian by Judith Sollosy and published by Archipelago Books

Niki, A Novel by Christos Chomenidis, translated from the Greek by Patricia Felisa Barbeito and published by Other Press

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgü, translated from the Turkish by Aron Aji and published by New York Review Books

Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Reuben Woolley and published by MacLehose Press

Exiled Shadow by Norman Manea, translated from the Romanian by Carla Baricz and published by Yale University Press

History of Ash by Khadija Marouazi, translated from the Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson and published by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press

Let’s Go Home, Son by Ivica Prtenjača, translated from the Croatian by David Williams and published by Istros Books

This Thing Called Love by Alawiya Sobh, translated from the Arabic by Max Weiss and published by Seagull Books

A Sensitive Person by Jáchym Topol, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Yale University Press

Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood and published by Jantar Publishing