This year, three judges will name a shortlist of three to five stories on September 15 and a winner on October 15. They are:
Jana Elhassan is a novelist and journalist. Her first novel, Forbidden Desires, was published in 2009 and won the Simon Hayek Prize. Her second novel Me, She and the Other Women was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, as was her third, The 99th Floor. The latter was translated to English by Michelle Hartman.
Adam Talib is the translator of Fadi Azzam’s Sarmada, Khairy Shalaby’s The Hashish Waiter, and Mekkawi Said’s Cairo Swan Song. He also co-translated (with Katharine Halls) Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace, for which he was a co-winner of the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation. He teaches Arabic literature at Durham University.