Winners of Second Annual Bait AlGhasham DarArab Prize
In Muscat, Oman, organizers put on a two-day ceremony to celebrate winners of the second-ever Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize.
The prize, which honors winners in two categories, presented the award in its translation category to American translator Luke Leafgren, who received the top honor for his English translation of الباغ by Bushra Khalfan, which he translated as The Garden.
Meanwhile, the prize in the authors category went to Sudanese novelist Mustafa Khalid Mustafa for his novel هاه هاه .. كح كح.. نجوت بأعجوبة (Ha Ha Kah Kah… I Barely Survived).
The winners were chosen from a shortlist of four in the translators category and five in the authors category. The other shortlisted translators were Burnaby Hawkes (for his translation of Organized Death, by Ahmed Magdy Hammam), Doha Mabrouk (for her translation of Chronicles of Al-Razi by Ayman Al-Dabbousi), and Farah Abu Tamman (for her translation of Dictionary of Things by Nadheer Al-Zoubi).
The other shortlisted authors were Jamal Barbary, for أوراق ميت تنبض بالحياة (Papers of a Dead Man Pulsating with Life), Abdelrazak Karar Osman, for نوريت (Nurit), Faleeha Hassan for قبل أن أنسى أنا شاعرة (Before I Forget, I Am a Poetess), and Nasr Mohsen, for خطوط العرض (Latitudes).
The 2025 judges were novelist Younis Al-Akhzami, translator Marilyn Booth, translator Mbarek Sryfi, and ArabLit’s M Lynx Qualey.
At the two-day celebratory symposium, held in Oman on February 16 and 17, Dar Arab also launched editions of its 2024 winners. Last year’s translation prize went to Marilyn Booth for her translation of Jan Dost’s Safe Corridor, which was launched during the event. And the Dar Arab publishing house also launched Mbarek Sryfi’s English translation of Yas Al-Saeedi’s موجز أنباء الهواجس , which won the 2024 author’s category, and has been published in English as Premonition News Flash.
Ali bin Mohammed Al Mujaini, Manager of DarArab Publishing and Translation, noted at the event that the Oman-based Bait AlGhasham DarArab Translation Prize was “driven by a firm belief in translation as a cultural bridge and a vision to expand Arabic literature’s global readership.”
