Karima Ahdad, Nasser Rabah, & Azza Abulanwar Win 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction Prizes

ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel announce the winners of the inaugural Arabic Flash Fiction Prize.

كريمة أحداد وناصر رباح وعزة أبو الأنوار يفوزون بجوائز القصص الومضية العربية لعام 2024

SEPTEMBER 15, 2024 – ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel are delighted to announce the three winners of this year’s Arabic Flash Fiction prize, who hail from Morocco, Palestine, and Egypt. Each uses markedly different approaches to their short-short fictions, which are by turns deeply tender and darkly ironic.

This year’s three top winners, chosen blindly by our judges, are:

1- “A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot” by Karima Ahdad, Morocco.

2- “Seedlings for the Dead” by Nasser Rabah, Palestine.  

3- “The Days of Nasi’” by Azza Abulanwar, Egypt.

Each of the top three winners receives a cash prize – first prize is £300, second is £200, and third prize is £100 – while all fifteen finalists, selected from among more than 800 submissions from around the world, will be translated to English, published in a bilingual anthology, and recorded by professional voice artists, read aloud on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other podcast platforms.

This year’s fifteen finalists and three top winners were chosen by celebrated authors Shahla Ujayli and Mansoura Ez Eldin, with celebrated translator Sarah Enany.

Judge Shahla Ujalyi said of Karima Ahdad’s “A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot”:

The story “A Slender Thorn Digs into My Foot” explores deeply complex and challenging human issues within a father-daughter relationship. Presented through a minimalist narrative, the story evokes nostalgia for a childhood that always feels incomplete—perhaps due to the ambiguous relationship between children and parents, that is, between submission to authority and love and duty. The story shifts from the present to the past, revealing a thorny relationship between a divorced daughter and a father who suffers from Alzheimer’s and a history full of complexities that leave scars—not from hatred, but from neglect. It highlights the hurt caused by fathers who ignore their children’s simple desires due to stubbornness, indifference, or immense pressure. This neglect doesn’t diminish love, but is unforgettable. It teaches us to differentiate between mercy and forgiveness, desire and compliance, and the feeling of oppression versus the need for care. Most importantly, it reminds us, once we are grown, to avoid becoming our fathers. Pain from fathers is deeply ingrained in our conscience. Whenever we remember their unfairness, we must also recall any moments of generosity, any glimpses of compassion, even if they are simple, because “sometimes it is enough for our fathers to lift us on their shoulders for us to love them deeply.”

Judge Sarah Enany said of Nasser Rabah’s “Seedlings for the Dead”:

In “Seedlings for the Dead,” an unnamed official in occupied Palestine, tasked with delivering sweet basil seedlings to cheer up children in refugee camps–an empty gesture at most–-is overcome with an impulse to scatter the doomed little plants over a coffin in a sparsely attended funeral procession he happens to pass by. The savage irony of the story interweaves symbols of death and life, the desire to make a difference and the harsh question whether our actions do, in fact, make any difference. It blurs the line between real and fake, offering a mordant criticism of empty gestures, noble thoughts and misguided emotions devoid of action.

And judge Mansoura Ezz Eldin said of “The Days of Nasi”:

The writer masterfully incorporates the months of the Coptic year, along with proverbs and beliefs from Egyptian folklore, to create a text deeply immersed in local culture yet universally relatable. With great artistry, the work expresses themes of alienation and the relationship between the body and nature, skillfully blending the real with the mythical.

This project is funded by the British Council’s Beyond Literature Borders programme corum by Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions.

The winning stories of 1,001 words or fewer will be available online and in a limited-edition bilingual publication.

About the winners:

Karima Ahdad is a Moroccan author based in Istanbul. She has been working in journalism and digital-content production since 2014, and she has published three novels: Cactus Girls, published by Dar Al-Fink in 2018; A Turkish Dream, published by the Arab Cultural Center in 2021; and The Other Woman, published by Al-Mutawassit Publications in 2024. She won the Moroccan Writers Union Award for Young Writers in the Short Story category, and her novel Cactus Girls won a Mohamed Zafzaf Award in 2020.

Nasser Rabah is a poet and novelist from Gaza. He has published five poetry collections and two novels.
In English, his work has been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Words Without Borders,
Literary Hub, ArabLit, Michigan Quarterly Review, O Bod, and Poetry International. A new collection of
his selected poetry is coming out in English translation with City Lights in Spring 2025, along with two
collections in Spanish. He is a 2024 Jean-Jacques Rousseau fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude,
Germany.

Azza Abulanwar is a proofreader and content writer with a BA in Islamic Studies from al-Azhar University. Her short story collection Those Who Slipped in the Oil Slick was published by Dar Rawafed.

About the judges:

Sarah Enany is a literary translator who works between Arabic and English. She has had this affliction for at least 30 years; it is probably hereditary since her parents were both literary translators. Among the works she has perpetrated is The Girl With Braided Hair by Rasha Adly, which won the 2022 Banipal Prize for translation.

Mansoura Ez Eldin is an Egyptian novelist and short-story writer whose works have been celebrated by a number of literary prizes and translated into more than ten languages. Among others, she has won prizes at the Cairo International Book Fair, the Sharjah International Book Fair, and been shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Her short story “Gothic Night” was the centerpiece of a Granta translation competition, won by Wiam El-Tamami. She currently serves as the executive editor of Akhbar Al-Adab.

Shahla Ujayli is a Syrian novelist and short-story writer who won the prestigious Almultaqa Prize for Arabic Short Stories for her collection A Bed for the King’s Daughter, which was translated to English by Sawad Hussain. She has twice been shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for A Sky So Close to Home and Summer with the Enemy, both of which were translated to English by Michelle Hartman.

Also: Fifteen Stories Shortlisted for 2024 Arabic Flash Fiction Prize