Three Novels on 2025 Sheikh Zayed Shortlist

MARCH 3, 2025 — Organizers of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award today announced their 2025 shortlists in seven categories; this year, each was just a short three-book list.

The three shortlisted this year for literature:

The Sphinx by Ahmed Mourad (Egypt), published by Dar El Shorouk in 202

Travels of the City of Clay Trilogy by Saud Alsanousi (Kuwait), published by Dar Kalimat Publishing & Distribution – Moulaph in 2023

Hind or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Hoda Barakat (Lebanon/France), published by Dar Aladab in 2024

The three works in the literature category are all by three acclaimed and popular authors. Two of the authors have previously won an International Prize for Arabic Fiction (shortlisted author Saud Alsanousi won an IPAF for The Bamboo Stalk and shortlisted Hoda Barakat for her novel The Night Post), and all three authors have been on an IPAF shortlist. Further, several of Ahmed Mourad’s novels have been turned into feature films.

Mourad’s The Sphinx is the second of his Suleiman Effendi al-Sioufi historical crime novels, and takes place during an outbreak of plague in nineteenth-century Egypt; Alsanousi’s Travels of the City of Clay trilogy centers on Kuwaiti history in the pre-oil era, telling its story through the lives of fishermen on the Kuwaiti coasts, which novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah called “a roaring torrent of myths, beliefs, legends, histories and tales”; while Barakat’s Hind, or the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, “explores a fraught relationship between a mother and her daughter, who suffers from a rare disease that disfigures her once-beautiful features” (Al Majalla).

Other shortlists announced included the Children’s Literature category, in which the shortlisted works are Maymouna and Her Crazy Ideas by Shireen Sabanegh (Jordan), published by Hachette Antoine/Nofal in 2023, The Phantom of Sabiba by Latifa Labsir (Morocco), published by Markaz Kitab in 2024, and The Digital Fox by Hegra Elsawi (Egypt), published by Dar Shan Publishing & Distribution in 2024.

Also, in the “Arab Culture in Other Languages” category, the shortlisted books were: Arabic Literary Culture in Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by Andrew Peacock (UK), published by Brill in 2024, The Rise of the Arabic Book by Beatrice Gruendler (Germany), published by Harvard University Press in 2020, and Geschichte des östlichen zagal: Dialektale arabische Strophendichtung aus dem Osten der arabischen Welt – von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der Mamlukenzeit (The History of Eastern Zajal: Arabic Poetry in Colloquial Dialects from the Eastern Arab World – From its Beginnings to the End of the Mamluk Era) by Hakan Özkan (Turkey), published by Ergon Verlag in German in 2020.

A complete list of shortlisted categories can be found at the SZBA website.

They further noted that the award had “decided to withhold the Award from the ‘Young Author’ and ‘Publishing and Technology’ categories for this edition.”