Algerian novelist Said Khatibi’s I Resist the River’s Course was today named the winner of the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) by the prize’s judging chair Mohamed Elkadhi.
“A Mask the Color of the Sky” practices what it clearly laid out: using literature to engage obsessively with colonial details, to challenge them, and to insist on a Palestinian narrative.
The chair of the judges for the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Mohamed Elkadhi, today announced the prize’s 2026 vibrant six-book shortlist in Manama, Bahrain.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction today announced 2026’s judges and 16-book longlist.
Here, Taissier Khalaf talks about The Andalusian Messiah, shortlisted for this year’s International Prize for Arabic Fiction. The novel follows Gonzalez’s quest for identity after his Morisco mother’s execution in 1592 Andalusia. The author digs into “secrets and mysteries” of “neglected margins” and reflects on his literary journey.
Mohamed Samir Nada talks about his dystopian novel Prayer of Anxiety, which won the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
“I was hoping I would see some more surprises, books that would somehow stick out, astonish me somehow. I know such books exist, but they do not always seem to be the ones that get to be submitted to IPAF.”
Last month, International Prize for Arabic Fiction judges announced that Iraqi writer Azher Jirjees had been shortlisted for the 2025 prize for his The Valley of the Butterflies, a novel set in Baghdad between 1999 and 2024 that tells the story of Aziz Awad, a government archivist who loses his job and struggles to keep his small family alive. Here, Jirjees talks about the power of satire, writing in exile, the Iraqi literary scene, and about how he and other Iraqi writers wanted to make “our voices heard, mine and those of my generation, who had lived through the ordeal from beginning to end.”
Last month, International Prize for Arabic Fiction judges announced that Mauritanian writer Ahmed Vall Dine had been shortlisted for the 2025 prize for his Danshmand, a fictionalized biography of the renowned scholar Imam Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (d. 1111). Vall Dine talks about his journey as a writer, the challenges that face Mauritanian writers, and why “any writer who takes on the challenge of portraying a historical Muslim scholar is actually fortunate.”
