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Marilyn Booth Wins 2025 Banipal Prize

JANUARY 7, 2025 — Organizers of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation announced the winner and runner-up of their 2025 award. The top prize went to Marilyn Booth for her translation of Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi, while the runner-up was Kay Heikkinen, for her translation of Radwa Ashour’s trilogy, Granada: The Complete Trilogy. Both were published by American University in Cairo Press.

The judging panel — chaired by Tina Phillips and including Susan F. Frenk, Nashwa Nasreldin, and Boyd Tonkin — released their report today.

In a prepared statement, organizers noted that “the judges selected Honey Hunger as the winner due to its exquisite language and style in translation and on account of the significance of the themes explored in the novel (love, addiction, environment), and the fresh perspective the Omani voice and setting brings to bear on them.”

As judge Tina Phillips wrote: “Marilyn Booth’s translation is a masterclass in poetic translation which remains remarkably true to the original and seamlessly transports the reader to distant mountain landscapes of Oman.”

Although Kay Heikkenen has previously won the Banipal (for her translation of Huzama Habayeb’s Velvet) this was, surprisingly, the first time Marilyn Booth has won the prize, after having been shortlisted for her translations of Jokha al-Harthi’s Celestial Bodies — for which the pair won an International Booker Prize — Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost and Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s Thieves in Retirement.

The 2025 shortlist also included several other acclaimed and award-winning titles: The Guardian of Surfaces by Bothayna Al-Essa (Kuwait), translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain (Selkies House Limited, 2024); On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (Syria), translated by Katharine Halls (Peirene Press, 2025); The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (Palestine), translated by Luke Leafgren (Penguin Press, 2024); and Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah (Palestine), translated by Barbara Romaine (Coffee House Press, 2024).

Sand-Catcher won the 2025 National Translation Award in Prose, The Tale of a Wall was longlisted for the National Book Award and the the PEN Translation Prize, and The Guardian of Surfaces was a National Book Award Finalist for Translated Literature in 2024.

The award ceremony is set to take place on February 10, 2026, at the British Library and online. It will be followed by events celebrating Arabic literary translation, including a February 13 talk where winning translator Marilyn Booth will be in conversation with the chair of the judging panel Professor Tina Phillips.