ArabLit Story Prize 2021 winners announced.

Mustafa Taj Alden Almosa, Maisaa Tanjour, and Alice Holttum were revealed to be the joint winners of the ArabLit Story Prize 2021 on October 15, 2021

The ArabLit Story Prize is an award celebrating the best short stories, in any genre, newly translated from Arabic into English. It was founded by Arablit.org, a leading resource on Arab literature in 2018. Previous winners of the prize have been Egyptian writer Mohammad Abdelnabi and Robin Moger (2018), Najwa Bin Shatwan and Sawad Hussain (2019), and Hadiya Hussein and Shakir Mustafa (2020).

The three judges for 2021 were Layla AlAmmar, a writer and academic from Kuwait; ArabLit’s Morocco and Algeria editor; and Leri Price, an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. The team announced the short stories in the running for the award on September 15 before the winner was revealed on October 15.

The winner for this year is;

• Mustafa Taj Alden Almosa’s How Kind They Are (كم هم لطفاء), as translated by Maisaa Tanjour & Alice Holttum.

Judge Leri Price said, of the story: “‘How Kind They Are’ is a simply exquisite piece of storytelling. Absurd, grotesque, and unsettling, it stays with you, ready at any moment to make solid ground feel that little more unstable beneath your feet.” She added: “The care and precision of the translators simply shone through their work as they recreated this into an equally fresh, disquieting translation.”

The winner and translators share the US$500 prize.

Click here to learn more about the winning story and its writer and translators. You can read the story by clicking here.