Judges Call Katharine Halls’ Banipal-winning Translation ‘Brilliant Feat’ & ‘Masterclass’
JANUARY 8, 2025 — Organizers today announced that the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has been awarded to Katharine Halls for her “masterclass” of a translation of Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence.
In their statement, the judges write that, “Halls not only gives a masterclass on the lexical and phrasal level; she also takes a scalpel to the structure of the original Arabic to produce a text that is more accessible to the English reader and less episodic than the original.”
This year’s judging panel was chaired by translator Raphael Cohen, and also included Times Literary Supplement editor Michael Caines, translator Laura Watkinson, and translator Nariman Youssef.
Of the award-winning title, Youssef said, “Halls seamlessly navigates culturally specific idioms and prison slang. Her bold choice to offer transliterations or literal translations of terms or phrases that might seem, at first glance, untranslatable – ‘truth is a mango’, ‘shambara’ – is justified time and again by the deft elucidations that she weaves into the text with inimitable simplicity.”
Halls’ translation of Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography in the US. The book is a chronicle of Naji’s time in prison, having been sentenced to two years for “violating public decency” after an excerpt of his novel Using Life allegedly caused a reader to experience heart trouble. Naji ultimately served ten months of that sentence, in Cairo’s Tora Prison.
As prize organizers write, “Through Naji’s writing, the world of Egyptian prison comes into vivid focus, with its cigarette-based economy, homemade chess sets, and well-groomed fixers. Naji’s storytelling is lively and uncompromising, filled with rare insights into both the mundane and grand questions he confronts.”
This win comes just as Imprisoning a Revolution: Writings from Egypt’s Incarcerated is published, in a translation by Collective Antigone, with a searing and illuminating introduction by Naji.
The ceremony is set to take place Thursday February 13 at 6 pm GMT, at the SOAS Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre and online. Prize-winner Katharine Halls will be in conversation with chair of judges Raphael Cohen, and academic and literary translator Margaret Litvin will give the prize’s annual lecture on the subject “Translating Beauty and Revolt in Arabic Literature Today.” The in-person and online event will be followed by a Q&A and a reception.
Organizers note that links to register for either in-person or online attendance will be available shortly at banipaltrust.org.uk/lecture/lecture2024.cfm.