Dena Afrasiabi, Yasmeen Hanoosh, and Perween Richards have been revealed to be the judges of the ArabLit Story Prize 2021 today, March 17, 2022.
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 have been Egyptian writer Mohammad Abdelnabi and Robin Moger (2018), Najwa Bin Shatwan and Sawad Hussain (2019), Hadiya Hussein and Shakir Mustafa (2020), and Mustafa Taj Alden Almosa, Maisaa Tanjour, and Alice Holttum (2021).
The three judges for the prize for 2022 have today been announced and they are;
Dena Afrasiabi, a writer and editor at University of Texas at Austin, where she oversees “Emerging Voices from the Middle East” and “Modern Middle East Literatures in Translation,” two award-winning translated book series distributed by University of Texas Press. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Michigan Quarterly Review and Monkeybicycle, among others, and has received fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Millay Colony, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.
Yasmeen Hanoosh, a fiction writer, literary translator, and professor at Portland State University, where she directs the Arabic program and teaches courses in Arabic language and literature. She grew up in Iraq and received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2008. She has written the short story collections Ardh al-Khayrat al-Mal’unah (The Land of Cursed Riches, Al-Ahali Press, 2021), and Atfal al-Jannah al-Mankubah (Children of Afflicted Paradise) which has been translated and excerpted in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, and Italian. As a translator, her English translations of Arabic fiction have appeared in various literary journals and publications. Her translation of Closing His Eyes (Abbas) received an NEA translation fellowship in 2010, and her translation of Scattered Crumbs (al-Ramli) won the Arkansas Arabic Translation Prize in 2002. As a scholar, she studies the cultural politics and literary expressions in post-2003 Iraq, especially what concerns the country’s ethno-religious minorities. She is the author of the monograph, The Chaldeans: Politics and Identity in Iraq and the American Diaspora (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Perween Richards, a literary translator from Arabic. She attended the Translate at City summer school in London in 2016, and was one of the two winners of the school’s annual translation competition, sponsored by Comma Press. She was awarded an English PEN Translates grant to translate The Sea Cloak, which was shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award and was listed as one of Books and Bao’s “10 Best Translated Books of 2019.”
Submissions are now open for the prize and will be received through Submittable. You can also get more information about the requirements by clicking here.
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