Nashwa Nasreldin Wins 2027 PEN/Heim Grant to Translate Amal Al Saeedi
OCTOBER 29, 2026 —PEN America yesterday announced the winners of several flagship grants, including the ten winners of the 2027 PEN/HEIM Translation Fund Grants. Among the winning translators is Nashwa Nasreldin, for her translation of Amal Al Saeedi’s Side Entrance to the House, a title ArabLit recommended in the “Translating Oman” edition of our newsletter for publishing professionals.
Nashwa said of the book:
Side Entrance to the House is a wonderful work by the Omani writer Amal Alsaeedi in which the author’s old family house serves as a vehicle to unearth recalled memories and images of childhood and youth, those memories triggering philosophical reflections on her troubled relationships with her husband, parents and siblings.
Amal Alsaeedi is a rare voice from the Gulf, who writes fresh, imaginative, relatable musings, from a perspective rarely heard in Arabic literature, let alone in translation, which tells us more about the realities of modern life in a still-exoticized region, than many bestsellers. This is a book that deserves to be placed on the shelves alongside popular western autofiction. Daring and adventurous, her writing opens up new modes of thought and plays with form to make for a gloriously satisfying read.
You can read an excerpt in The Common and another that appeared on ArabLit.
Each winning translator receives a grant of $4,000 to support the translation’s completion.Over email, Nashwa said, “I’m very grateful to the jury for seeing the potential in Amal Al Saeedi’s work and I look forward to bringing her writing to English readers!”
This year’s PEN/Heim judges were Izidora Angel, Brian Baer, Sean Bye, Sarah Coolidge, Isabella Corletto, Yardenne Greenspan, Denise Kripper, Bel Olid, Frances Riddle, and Paul Worley.
The other nine supported projects:
Madeleine Arenivar’s translation from Spanish of How to Write a “Son” by Juan Montaño Escobar
Isabelle Chen’s translation from French of New Territories by Grace Ly
Plator Gashi’s translation from Albanian of Testosteron by Arbër Selmani
Sergey Nikolaev’s translation from Russian of Suyer-Viyer by Yuri Koval
Quỳnh-Anh Nguyen’s translation from Vietnamese of The Age of Poisonous Water by Dương Nghiễm Mậu
Lucy Scott’s translation from Surinamese Dutch of People of the Sun, People of the Moon by Xillan Macrooy
Ena Selimović’s translation from Bosnian of Quick, Think Up a City by Lejla Kalamujić
Tola Sylvan’s translation from Brazilian Portuguese of Disappearance Poem by Laura Liuzzi
Hunter Therron’s translation from Thai of Pab Paew: A Novel by Phaitoon Thanya
Amal Al Saeedi, a prominent Omani author, also recently won a grant for The Cultural History of the Grocery Store, a “reflective long-form text that weaves together autobiography and collective memory in Oman, tracing the transformation of the grocery store from a symbol of consumption into a space of fracture and confession. Through a female body burdened with heritage, and a family grief that stretches from the mountains to the sea, the text shapes a personal Omani history of loss.”
Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and a translator of Arabic literature. Her book translations include Shatila Stories, a collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, which was longlisted for the EBRD Literature prize, and After Coffee, by Abdelrashid Mahmoudi, which was a Fiction Finalist in the International Book Awards. She is also the co-translator of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. She is also a senior contributing editor at ArabLit.
