This year’s panel of judges for the International Prize for Arab Fiction (IPAF) has finally revealed its long-awaited shortlist, featuring two female authors and four male ones.
Shukri Mabkhour, the chair of judges, points out that this year’s selected novels include a “strikingly diverse range of topics and forms around identity and freedom” and depict “the endeavors of marginalized, oppressed, or forgotten individuals.”
The shortlisted authors come from Egypt, Libya, Kuwait, Omar, the UAE, and Morocco, represented by the multiple award-winning writer Mohsine Loukili.
Loukili had already won four different awards in the past, the last of which was the Ghassan Kanafani Award for Narration in 2016. It was his novel, The Prisoner of the Portuguese (ed. Dar Mim) that earned him a place on this year’s shortlist of the best works of Arab fiction.
The Prisoner of the Portuguese is about a man who leaves Fez for the countryside searching for work to support his wife and three children. In a twist of fate, he is imprisoned in a Portuguese jail on the Atlantic coast. The novel has received a lot of praise since its publication in 2020 and has been a critics’ favorite.
The six shortlisted authors will each receive a prize of $10k, with the winner, announced on May 22, receiving an additional $50k, delivered by the Booker Prize Foundation in London.
Since the International Prize for Arab Fiction was created in Dubai in 2007, it was awarded to only one other Moroccan, Mohamed Achaari, in 2011 for his novel The Arch and the Butterfly.
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