Ahmed Naji’s novel Rotten Evidence won the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation 2024 on Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize is an annual award for published translations from Arabic of full-length works of imaginative and creative writing of literary merit and general interest worth £3,000. Established in 2006 by Banipal Magazine and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, the prize is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash and his family in memory of his father, a passionate bibliophile.
The jury announced the fourteen different publishers’ shortlist from the nineteen entries on December 2. The winner, revealed on January 8, is Rotten Evidence, Ahmed Naji, translated by Katharine Halls (McSweeney’s, 2023). The book is a prison memoir from when the Egyptian government imprisoned Naji. Here is the book’s blurb;
In February 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for “violating public decency,” after an excerpt of his novel Using Life reportedly caused a reader to experience heart palpitations. Naji ultimately served ten months of that sentence, in a group cellblock in Cairo’s Tora Prison.
Rotten Evidence is a chronicle of those months. Through Naji’s writing, the world of Egyptian prison comes into vivid focus, with its cigarette-based economy, homemade chess sets, and well-groomed fixers. Naji’s storytelling is lively and uncompromising, filled with rare insights into both the mundane and grand questions he confronts.
How does one secure a steady supply of fresh vegetables without refrigeration? How does one write and revise a novel in a single notebook? Fight boredom? Build a clothes hanger? Negotiate with the chief of intelligence? And, most crucially, how does one make sense of a senseless oppression: finding oneself in prison for the act of writing fiction? Genuine and defiant, this book stands as a testament to the power of the creative mind, in the face of authoritarian censorship.
The award will be officially presented at the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes Ceremony at the British Library on February 12, 2025.
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