Submissions open 15 November 2023, for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature 2024 and will close on 15 January 2024.
The winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature will be awarded a cash prize of US$5,000 and will also win publication worldwide in English translation by the American University in Cairo Press’s fiction imprint Hoopoe.
The award is open to novels written and published in Arabic anywhere in the world, with a copyright date of 2022 or 2023, which have not been translated and published in English.
The Medal is awarded every two years on 11 December, the anniversary of Naguib Mahfouz’s birth. The next winner will be announced on 11 December 2024 and a shortlist will be announced on 30 August 2024.
The winning novel will be selected by a panel of judges, which will be headed by award-winning literary translator and academic Sarah Enany. Sarah is a professor in the English Department of Cairo University and received the prestigious Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for her translation of The Girl with Braided Hair by Rasha Adly (Hoopoe, 2020). She has also translated The Book Smuggler by Omaima Al-Khamis (Hoopoe,2021)and the Jewish Muslim trilogy by the late Kamal Ruhayyim.
The 27 winners of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature since its inauguration include 13 Egyptians, 3 Palestinians, 3 Algerians, 2 Lebanese, 1 Moroccan, 2 Syrians, 1 Iraqi, 1 Sudanese, and 1 Saudi Arabian. The last winner was Fatma Qandil for her novel Empty Cages (Aqfas farigha published by Kotob Khan in 2020) and the English translation is planned for release in Fall 2024.
The American University in Cairo Press is the primary English-language publisher of Naguib Mahfouz and has published or licensed some 600 foreign-language editions of the Nobel laureate’s works in 40 languages.
