Muhammad Abdelnabi is the ArabLit Story Prize 2018 winner for his short story Our Story translated by Roger Moger. The announcement was made on October 15, 2018.
The ArabLit Story Prize is a new award for the best short stories, in any genre, newly translated from Arabic into English. Translators must have rights to the work, and translations must have been previously unpublished.
The judges for this year’s prize were novelist, short-story writer, and critic Maan Abu Taleb (All the Battles); award-winning translator Thoraya El Rayyes (co-winner of 2014 University of Arkansas Arabic Translation Award for her translation of The Perception of Meaning); novelist and commentator Ruqaya Izzidien (The Watermelon Boys, forthcoming Hoopoe Fiction).
In September, the prize announced those who were shortlisted and it included Egyptian writer Mohammad Abdelnabi. The other stories on the shortlist were Maya Abu-Alhayyat,’s Kharandia, translated by Riham Adly, Rasha Abbas’s How to Swim the Backstroke with a Shilka Missile, translated by Fatima El-Kalay Raja Alem’s The Boa, translated by Rana Ghuloom.
The announcement made earlier today was for the Egyptian for Our Story which comes from his 2014 short story collection, As the Torrent Carries Away a Sleeping Village, published by Dar Merit. The writer goes home with a US$250 prize, split between him and his translator.
You can read the award winning story and the citation for its win here.
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