Today, 15 December 2025, the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF), the most prestigious literary prize in the Arab world, has revealed the longlist of 16 novels in contention for the 2026 prize.

 The longlist has been chosen from a total of 137 submissions by a panel of five judges chaired by Tunisian researcher and critic Mohamed Elkadhi. Joining him on the panel are Palestinian writer and translator Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Bahraini academic and critic Dheya Alkaabi, South Korean academic Laila Hyewon Baek, and Iraqi writer and translator Shakir Nouri.

 The selection includes one previous winner: Adelouahab Aissaoui (2020), two authors who have been previously shortlisted by IPAF: Said Khatibi (2020), Abdelmajid Sebbata (2021), and three previously longlisted authors: Ahmad Abdulatif (2018, 2023), Omaima Abdullah Al-Khamis (2010, 2019) and Amin Zaoui (2013, 2018, 2024). The other ten authors feature on the list for the first time: Najwa Barakat, Nizar Chakroun, Marwan Al-Ghafouri, Abdelsalem Ibrahim, Doaa Ibrahim, Diaa Jubaili, Khalil Sweileh, Sherifa Al-Toubi, Abdo Wazen, Essam El Zayaat.

 The longlisted novels reach widely back and forward in time, from ancient Middle Eastern civilisations more than 4000 years ago to a futuristic Cairo where humanity is on the brink of extinction, and from late 20th century Yemeni and Omani villages to a current day Japanese prison. They trace decades of political and social upheavals in countries such as Algeria and Iraq, and focus on the personal struggles of individuals who commit crimes, driven by passion, politics or psychosis. They also spotlight the complex relationship between reality and its depictions in books and film, asking who owns the story.     

 The full list of 2026 longlisted books, in alphabetical order by author surname, is as follows:

Mohamed Elkadhi, Chair of the 2026 judges, said:

 “The novels included in this year’s longlist are a microcosm of the contemporary Arab literary  scene in all its richness and variety. Many of the novels turn inward, exploring the private worlds of distinctive and unforgettable characters experiencing psychological crises and struggling to adapt to lived reality. History, too, figures prominently in works that evoke the recent or distant past with striking immediacy, probing its reverberations in the present.

 Questions of identity also recur, framed against the backdrop of war, conflict, migration, revolution, and the uneven rhythms of social and urban change. While some writers adopt realism and classical structures, a greater number blur the boundaries between the real and the extraordinary. 

 Their narratives employ multiple narrators, streams of consciousness, and fragmented structures to reflect the relativity of the universe. Digging deep into the human psyche, they portray the pain suffered by those who feel isolated and alienated from reality, as they strive to uncover a truth distinct to that commonly accepted, moving in the orbits of the repressed and the unspoken.”

 Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the Board of Trustees, said: 

 “Despite their different voices and diverse themes, most of the novels on this year’s longlist share a common impulse: they turn to the past to make sense of the fractures of a betrayed present. Their return to the past is not an exercise in nostalgia, often expressed in Arab societies through the sentimental cliché of ‘the good old days.’ Instead, it is a way of approaching the dystopia these societies are living through today. 

 What is striking about this tendency—seen through the local settings and contemporary realities depicted in the novels—is the convergence of perspectives that emerges from their narratives. It is as if they whisper to the reader from Yemen to Tangier transiting through Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo: ‘In our struggles, we are all Arabs! How long will we have to wait!’”  

 The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is an annual literary prize for novels in Arabic, which will award $50,000 to the winner. It is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, at the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.

 Key Dates:

- The six shortlisted titles will be chosen by the judges and announced in February 2026 in Bahrain. 

- The winning novel will be announced on Thursday 9 April 2026 in Abu Dhabi.

 Reflecting its mission to increase the international reach of Arabic fiction, recent winning IPAF novels which have been published or are forthcoming in English include Basim Khandaqji’s A Mask, the Colour of the Sky (winner 2024, anticipated publication in 2026 from Europa Editions) and Zahran Alqasmi’s The Water Diviner (winner 2023, forthcoming publication by Hoopoe). IPAF 2025 novels which are forthcoming in English include Haneen Al-Sayegh's The Women’s Covenant (2025 shortlisted, anticipated publication by Interlink in 2026), Nadia Najar's The Touch of Light (2025 shortlisted, forthcoming publication by ELF Publishing in 2026), and Iman Humaydan's Songs for the Darkness (2025 longlisted, to be published by Interlink in 2026).

 -Ends-

 For further information about the prize, please visit:

Website www.arabicfiction.org
Facebook @InternationalPrizeforArabicFiction
Instagram @arabicfictionprize
 For all media enquiries, please contact the team at Four Agency:

Ruark Jon-Stevens Ruark.Jon-Stevens@four.agency | +44 (0)7402 994 747

 Arifah Chowdhury Arifah.Chowdhury@four.agency | +44 (0)20 3103 9639 

Notes to Editors

• The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is awarded for novels in Arabic and each of the six shortlisted finalists receives $10,000, with a further $50,000 going to the winner. For further information about the Prize, please visit www.arabicfiction.org or follow the prize on Facebook or Instagram.
• Images of the judges, the longlisted authors, and their book jackets are available to download here. 
• This press release is also available in Arabic. Please request via email if required. 

 IPAF Longlist 2026 — synopses and biographies 

 Ahmad Abdulatif is an Egyptian novelist, translator, journalist and researcher, born in 1978 and currently living in Madrid, Spain. He studied Spanish Language and Literature at Cairo University and Arabic Literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has published eight novels. His first, The Keymaker (2010), won the 2011 Egyptian State Encouragement Prize; his third, The Book of the Sculptor (2013), won the 2015 Sawiris Cultural Award; and his fifth, The Earthen Fortress, was IPAF-longlisted in 2018 and translated into Spanish. His novel The Ages of Daniel in the City of Threads (2022) was IPAF-longlisted in 2023. Abdulatif has written and translated for the cultural press since 2003 and has translated more than forty books from Spanish into Arabic. He won the Egyptian National Centre for Translation Award in 2013 for his translation of Infinity in the Palm of Her Hand by Gioconda Belli.  

 The Origin of Species

 How might the world appear in a post-human era, not just in terms of technology, but from a human perspective? The Origin of Species draws on Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and pushes it to its extreme to address the crisis of modern humanity. Its protagonists lose not only their hair, fingers, toes and other body parts, but also emotions such as love, hate, and anger. This physical and emotional evolution of humanity mirrors the transformations of Cairo, an ancient city on the brink of extinction, where the dead flee their graves and ghosts wander among the living. The novel depicts the final throes of an old version of humanity before it is replaced by a new one, imagining a fluid concept of time in which different time periods co-exist.

 Omaima Al-Khamis is a Saudi Arabian writer, born in 1966. She studied Arabic Literature at King Saud University, Riyadh. Before becoming a full-time writer in 2010, she worked as a teacher and was director of the Department of Educational Media in the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Education. Since 1993, she has published four short story collections and several novels including Al-Bahriyat (2006), The Leafy Tree (2008), IPAF-longlisted in 2010, Saja’s Visit (2013) and Voyage of the Cranes in the Cities of Agate (2017) which won the 2018 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was IPAF-longlisted in 2019. She has also published a number of children’s books which have been translated into other languages. She writes a weekly column in Elaph newspaper. 

 The Al Musharaq Family’s Aunt

This novel tells the story of the marriage between the Al Musharaq family’s aunt and a German doctor working for a Christian missionary society in Muharraq, Bahrain, in the early part of the last century. It poses questions about Orientalism and the recording of history: Who has the right to tell a story, and how are stories passed down from generation to generation and from one culture to another, reconstructed and re-documented according to differing worldviews and ideologies? The story begins when an epidemic and the First World War create an opportunity for a missionary society to penetrate the heart of the Arabian Peninsula, and it spans a century, from 1918 to 2018. The story is rediscovered in modern times when a member of the Al Mashreq family, studying film directing in America, attempts to make a film about the aunt using Orientalist writings, translations of books, historical documents, and oral histories. However, when an American director tries to make and claim the film as his own, the family is compelled to document the story in its own way.

Abdelouahab Aissaoui is an Algerian novelist, born in 1985. He studied theatre criticism at the Higher Institute of Performing Arts in Algiers and is currently Director of the Abderrahmane Ben Hamida Main Public Reading Library in Boumerdès. In 2012, his debut novel, Jacob’s Cinema, came first in the novel category of Algeria’s President of the Republic Prize. He won Algeria's Assia Djebar Prize for his second novel, Mountain of Death (2015). In 2016, he took part in the IPAF Nadwa (creative writing workshop for talented young writers). In 2017 his novel Circles and Doors (2017) won the Kuwaiti Suad al-Sabah Novel Prize, and he won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in the unpublished novel category, for Testament of the Deeds of the Forgotten Ones (2017). The Spartan Court (2018) won the 2020 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and has since been translated into four languages. His two most recent novels are Stalin’s Complex (2025) and Grandma Touma’s Cord (2025).   Grandma Touma’s Cord

 A young journalist is assigned to write a biography of a deceased colonel who held a sensitive position in a state agency. His investigation leads him to the town of Frija, the final resting place of Grandma Toma, a figure shrouded in legend and ritual. He discovers that the grandmother was not merely a keeper of family history but also a witness to the bloody chapters of Algeria’s past, from colonialism to independence, and from the revolution to the disappointments that followed. The narrative alternates between autumn 1989 in the capital, Algiers, where the regime is crumbling, and March 1962 in Frija, where a strange reconciliation takes place between warring revolutionary factions. Grandma Touma’s Cord is a novel in which personal destinies intertwine with collective history, in a plot that combines symbolic and philosophical elements with those of the detective thriller.

Najwa Barakat is a Lebanese novelist and journalist, born in 1960. She studied theatre at the College of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut before moving to Paris in 1985, where she enrolled in the Film Academy. She has worked in journalism and produced and presented several literary and cultural programmes. She began her writing career in 1986 and her published works include The Bus of the People (1996), Ya Salam (1999), The Language of Secrets (2004), Mr. Noon (2019), and The Absence of Mai (2025). Her works have garnered widespread critical attention and been translated into several languages. She has been shortlisted for and won several international awards, including the shortlist of the Prix de la littérature arabe, (awarded by the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris for the best Arabic novel translated into French), for The Secret Language and Mr. Noon in 2015 and 2021 respectively; the shortlist of the 2021 Prix Femina étranger (French Foreign Literature Prize) and the shortlist of the 2023 European EBRD Literature Prize, both for Mr. Noon. She founded the “How to Write a Novel” creative writing workshop, which has resulted in 23 new novels being published by respected Arab publishing houses. She currently researches and presents the weekly literary programme Readings on the Al-Araby 2 channel and writes a weekly column for the Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper.

 The Absence of Mai

 In her flat on the ninth floor, Mai, who is in her eighties, lives alone. From her balcony, she gazes down at Beirut, observing life and the changes taking place in the city. Her two sons are abroad and have entrusted her care to the building’s concierge, Youssef, and the family doctor, Daoud. One day, Mai is startled by a voice calling her name. Who can the visitor be, and how did he manage to get in at dawn, through two locked doors? The Absence of Mai explores the dangerous paths down which memory can lead, the wounds of the heart, and how people can withdraw from emotional connection, even with a cat.

Nizar Chakroun is a Tunisian writer, born in 1970. He was a lecturer at the University of Tunis and elected dean of the Higher Institute of Arts and Crafts in Sfax in 2011. He also worked as a cultural advisor at the Ministry of Culture in Doha. He has written more than twenty published works, ranging from poetry and novels to art criticism and translation, and has won several prestigious awards, including the National Poetry Prize in Tunisia and the Arab Prize for Fine Arts Criticism from the Sharjah government. His debut novel was The Daughter of My Master (2011), followed by The Bell and the Minaret (2018), The Bull’s Blood (2019), Zoul Allah (2022), which won the Tunisian Al-Bashir Khrayyef Prize for Fiction for the best Tunisian novel of 2023, and Days of the Murdered Fatimid (2025).  

 Days of the Murdered Fatimid

 In the “White City” in 2030, during the “Pig Revolution”, the mummified body of Mokhtar al-Fatimi is exhumed by military order for an autopsy. The disturbance releases Mokhtar’s spirit, which has been trapped within the coffin for many years. While following what happens to his own body, he also revisits his former life as a young researcher in his Tunisian hometown and his trips to Cairo and Alexandria, tracing the history of his Fatimid ancestors. The narrative moves fluidly across past, present, and future, giving the most uncanny and astonishing moments a sense of unsettling, persuasive reality. 

Marwan Al-Ghafouri is a Yemeni poet, novelist, and doctor, born in 1979. He studied Medicine at Ain Shams University and Cairo University, before travelling to Germany where he obtained a doctorate in medicine from the University of Duisburg-Essen. He currently lives in Germany where he works as a consultant in cardiology and intensive care, as well as writing for a number of Arab and local newspapers. He has published several books of poetry and novels, including The Exile of Mansour the Lame (2016), The Whale’s Path (2018), Sheikh Ahmad’s War (2020), and Five Houses for God and a Room for My Grandmother (2025). He has won a number of prizes for his poetry, including the 2004 Sharjah Award for Creativity for Nights, and Lebanon’s Naji Naaman Literary Prize in 2008 for Cities in the Shoes of Walkers. 

 Five Houses for God and a Room for My Grandmother

 This is the story of Yemen in the 1990s, marked by the rise of Islamic movements - from Tablighis and Sufis to Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood - and the sweeping changes that transformed Yemeni society during that period. An unnamed protagonist leaves his mountain village to complete secondary school in the city. There, he discovers five paths leading to God, whereas in his village, God was only one. He decides to try them all. When he learns that his grandmother is unwell and has begun seeing visions of dead men, he returns to the village to help her.  Abandoning school, he journeys with her through villages and hamlets, hoping to guide her back to the right path. But each time he tries a path to God, his grandmother becomes more troubled, until he finally decides to take her to live in the home of Shams al-Din, the Sufi sheikh of the city. In that house, filled with the remembrance of God, the women crowd around his grandmother to hear her racy, invented stories about the men of the village. At this point, Shams al-Din realises that all the knowledge he had ever gained in his life cannot compete with a single story told by an old woman.

 Abdelsalem Ibrahim is an Egyptian novelist and translator, born in 1966. He has published three short story collections and five novels Kadesh: War and Peace (2008), Dinari’s Throne (2016), The Community of God (2018), The Inheritance of the Sun (2020), and The Solitude of the Kangaroo (2025). He has translated numerous books from English into Arabic, including Play with a Tiger by Doris Lessing, Ten Lost Plays by Eugene O’Neill, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, and After the Storm by Ernest Hemingway. 

 The Solitude of the Kangaroo

 Zidan, the main protagonist of The Solitude of the Kangaroo, is a member of the Sudanese Tongi, a group of tribes forced to leave their lands and relocate to southern Egypt in the late 1930s. Through his story, and that of others, we discover the plight of a stateless people, unable to control their own destiny, and compelled to forge an identity from the wreckage of bloody ethnic conflict. Isolated and surrounded by kangaroos, symbolic of escape and reflection, Zidan seeks to understand his surroundings, dreaming of an alternative future, even as hope recedes. At the heart of the book lies the question of identity: Zidan is torn between understanding and engaging with reality on one hand, and detachment from it and withdrawal into himself on the other. 

Doaa Ibrahim is an Egyptian writer, born in 1983. She graduated with a BA in Medicine and Surgery at Alexandria University. Her first collection of short stories, Inscriptions Around a Mural, was published in 2013, followed by A Second Funeral for a Lonely Man (2015), shortlisted twice for the Egyptian Sawiris Cultural Award in two consecutive years. She has four published novels, Adam Has Seven Legs (2017), Six Souls Are Enough to Play (2019), which won the Ghassan Kanafani Prize for Arabic Fiction from the Palestine International Foundation, A Pea Sprouts in My Palm (2023), and A Cloud Above My Head (2024). 

 A Cloud Above My Head 

 Told in the first person, this is the story of Noha, whose father abandons her as a child to marry a Japanese woman, while her mother marries one man after another, leaving her a victim of domestic abuse. As an adult, she becomes a nurse who kills her patients and anyone who tries to befriend or love her. She moves to Japan to escape her crimes but finds that she cannot escape herself, continuing her mission to end the lives of everyone she loves. In a Japanese prison, she learns more about this secretive country which drives people to honourable suicide. A Cloud Above My Head is a brutal and profound novel that prompts reflection on the complex mysteries of the human psyche.

 Diaa Jubaili is an Iraqi novelist, born in 1977. He has published over ten novels, four short story collections and a number of short stories in international magazines and periodicals. He has won many literary prizes, including the Dubai Cultural Magazine Award for The Curse of Marquez (2007) in 2007, the Sudanese Tayeb Salih Award for What Would We Do Without Calvino? (2016) in 2017,Kuwait’s Al-Multaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story for No Windmills in Basra (2018) in 2018 and the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in the historical novel category for The Precious Narrative of What Was Not Told by Tabari - The Zanj Rebellion (2021) in 2024. His novel The Tree Boy (2021) was shortlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the Children’s and Young Adult Literature category in 2022. His short story collection No Windmills in Basra was translated into English by Chip Rossetti and published by Deep Vellum in the United States. 

 The Seer

 The Seer follows the character Damu the Sumerian on an eternal journey through history. His story begins with the decline of the Sumerian city states and the rise of the Akkadian Empire, then moves through the emergence and fall of Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations, and the waves of invasions, occupations, and major events that shaped Mesopotamia. Across the centuries, states, kingdoms, and empires rise and vanish, culminating in the second decade of the second millennium CE. Damu is both a witness and chronicler of these historical events, and the novel’s central theme - the concept of immortality - is drawn from the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is divided into six books which reflect the evolution of writing and its tools throughout the ages: writing on tablets (the Book of Clay), writing on parchment (the Book of Parchment), writing on papyrus (the Book of Papyrus), writing on ordinary paper (the Book of Paper), writing by typewriter (the Book of Remington), and finally writing by computer (the Book of Microsoft).

 Said Khatibi is an Algerian novelist, born in 1984. He studied French Literature at the University of Algiers and Cultural Studies at the Sorbonne University. Since 2006 he has worked in journalism and currently lives in Slovenia. His published works include: The Orbit of Absence (a translation into French of Algerian stories, 2009), Book of Sins (2013), Flaming Gardens of the East (2015), Forty Years Waiting for Isabel (2016), which won the 2017 Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel, in the published novels category; and Firewood of Sarajevo (2018), IPAF-shortlisted in 2020 and published in English by Banipal Books and in Serbian by Geopoetika Books. His novel The End of the Desert (2022) won the 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, in the young author category. He also won the Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Literature in 2015.  

 I Resist the River’s Course

 A renowned ophthalmologist and her husband, a doctor in charge of a hospital morgue, conspire to steal corneas from the deceased to sell in her clinic. But when he is murdered and she is interrogated, the secrets of their relationship are exposed. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, veteran fighters plead for the dismissal of the fabricated charges of collaboration with the French occupiers made against them. The connection between these two different scenarios is revealed as the novel progresses. I Resist the River’s Course chronicles half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War to the early 1990s, including the War of Liberation and its aftermath.

 Abdelmajid Sebbata is a Moroccan novelist, blogger and translator, born in 1989. He obtained an MA in Civil Engineering from Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tangiers, and an MA in Translation (Arabic - French - English) from the King Fahd School of Translation in Tangier, Morocco. He has written articles on literary, cultural and historical subjects which have been published in print and online in Morocco and other Arab countries. He is the author of four novels: Behind the Wall of Passion (2015), The Zero Hour 00:00 (2017), which won the Moroccan Book Award in 2018, File 42 (2020), IPAF-shortlisted in 2021 and published in English by Banipal Books as The Secrets of Folder 42, and In The Labyrinths of Mr. F. N. (2025). He has also translated numerous books, including two novels by the French thriller writer Michel Bussi.  

 In The Labyrinths of Mr. F N

 Farid Nouri, a professor of comparative literature and cultural studies at Ibn Battuta University in Tangier, dies mysteriously after a harassment scandal that destroyed his life and shook the foundations of his college. Yet questions remain about the true nature of the man whose family, colleagues and students regard as either a merciful angel or a cursed devil. Who holds the answers? A Nazi officer in hiding, a mute hotel employee in a forgotten Tangier hotel, a Moroccan ambassador on a mission to a Spanish king, or an elderly Lebanese woman clinging to her scattered memories far from her homeland? The search for the truth will mean returning to the distant past, long before Professor F N’s lifetime, and beyond Tangier’s borders to far-flung corners of the world. Perhaps this is because a person’s true story does not begin with their birth or end with their death. The truth itself can be elusive; hidden in labyrinths that defy the straight lines of time and the confines of space. 

 Khalil Sweileh is a Syrian novelist and journalist, born in 1959. His published novels include Urgent Mail (2004), Don’t Blame Me (2006), The Scribe of Love (2008), which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2009; Zuhour, Sara and Nariman (2008), The Gazelle Will Come to You (2011), Paradise of the Barbarians (2014), The Test of Regret (2017), winner of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2018, in the literature category; The Solitude of the Snail (2019), The Death of Opportunities (2022), and Water of the Bride (2025). He has also published works of literary criticism. Several of his novels have been translated variously into English, German and Ukrainian. 

 Water of the Bride

 Set in Syria, this novel-within-a-novel depicts the lives of those on the margins of society who face oppression and tyranny. In the framing story, a writer driven by a desire for creative renewal searches for a way out of his own crises through the act of writing. His novel draws on a range of texts and documents to give voice to imagined characters from the desert and Damascus. Bound together by their shared experience of helplessness and humiliation, these figures inhabit worlds overshadowed by a repressive political system.

 Sherifa Al-Toubi is a short story writer and novelist, born in Oman in 1971. She studied Sociology at Sultan Qaboos University and is retired from the Royal Oman Police. She worked as a civilian officer in the General Directorate of Prisons, then in the Public Relations Department, and later in the General Directorate of Criminal Investigations. She wrote the weekly column “Watr” for the Oman newspaper, has contributed articles to local newspapers and The Journal of Law and Society and published short stories in the Nazwa cultural magazine and on cultural websites. Her literary publications include Suad…Letters That Did Not Arrive (2016), The Eye of Blackness (2017), Prisoner of the Blue (2017), which won the 2021 Cultural Creativity Award in the Sultanate of Oman, Reflection (2020), and the fictional trilogy The Flag, the Valley Quarter (2022), The Flag, the Mountain Heights (2023), which won the Sharjah Award for Gulf Women’s Creativity in 2024, and The Flag, The Blowing of the Wind (2024).

 The Flag: The Blowing of the Wind

 The Flag: The Blowing of the Wind explores the socio-political history of Oman between 1959-1970, a period often overlooked by historians, focusing on the Dhofar Rebellion. It tells the story of the “comrades”, young men and women who were influenced by communist and socialist thought during an era of global revolutions. Driven by a desire to free their societies from the evil trinity of poverty, bad health and ignorance, they leave an Oman mired in cultural and social isolation for other countries. Among them is Hamoud, sent by the Iman to Egypt to complete his studies. There, he meets Ahmed and Abdul Salam and discovers in their ideas the answers he seeks. Leaving religion behind, he adopts the theories of Lenin and Marx, believing in the better life that awaits him. Among the strong female characters is Basma from Bahrain, a commander of one of the factions in Dhofar, and Tuful, who rebels against social customs and the slavery of colour, gender and social background. The novel brings to life pivotal moments in the comrades’ lives as they face their final choice: whether to surrender to the new, youthful Sultan, who has declared an amnesty, or to follow the path they have chosen until the very end.

Abdo Wazen is a Lebanese poet and critic, born in 1957. He is editor-in-chief of the cultural pages of the Independent Arabia newspaper and former cultural editor of the Al-Hayat newspaper. He won the Dubai Press Club’s 2005 Cultural Journalism Award, and the 2012 Sheikh Zayyed Children's Literature Award for The Young Man Who Saw the Colour of the Air (2011). He has published seven volumes of poetry and three novels, as well as works of criticism and translation. His poetic works include Garden of the Senses (1993), Doors of Sleep (1996), Lantern of Temptation (2000), Fire of Return (2003), A Broken Life (2007) and The Days Are Not for Bidding Them Farewell (2014). His other works include My Father’s Room (2003), Open Heart (2009), Life Is Not a Novel (2025), Mahmoud Darwish: The Stranger Falls Upon Himself (2006), and Amin Maaluf, Breaking Boundaries (2012). His poetry has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. 

 Life Is Not a Novel

 The novel’s protagonist, nicknamed “the Reader”, is a man whose life revolves around books, especially novels, yet he discovers that life, with all its love, loss, and mystery, cannot be read like a story. Through his relationship with Jocelyn, the woman who gave him his nickname, and Joseph, the friend who is both brother and rival, he embarks on a profound personal journey, through which he will experience ambiguous love, wounded desire, a crisis of identity, and the lingering pain of war’s permanent scars. The novel poses the questions: can reading protect us from loss? Can writing reshape a shattered world? Here, reading does not merely form the background to the story, but is a protagonist in its own right, a parallel text that nourishes the narrative from within. The books “the Reader” consumes mirror his inner state, becoming living beings that ease his loneliness. His library and imagination are filled with Dostoevsky, Kafka, Proust, Beckett, Camus, Mahfouz, Cossery, and others.

Amin Zaoui is an Algerian novelist and thinker, born in 1956. He is Professor of Comparative Literature and Contemporary Thought at the Central University of Algiers and was previously Director General of the National Library of Algeria and head of the Algerian branch of the Anna Lindh Foundation. He writes in both Arabic and French and has won numerous international prizes, including the 1998 French Secondary School Students Prize and the 2007 Cultural Dialogue Prize awarded by the President of Italy. His Arabic novels include The Goatherd (2011, IPAF-longlisted in 2013), The Queen (2014), Leg Over Leg (2016, IPAF-longlisted in 2018), The Pals (2018), The Pasha’s Secretary (2019), and The Idols (2024, IPAF-longlisted in 2024). His French novels include La Soumission (1998), Haras de Femmes (2001), Festin de Mensonges (2007), La Chambre de la Vierge Impure (2009), and L’Enfant de l’Oeuf (2017). His novels have been translated into 13 languages.

 Siesta Dream

 Siesta Dream shines a spotlight on female courage. Its central protagonist, Masouda al-Qarih, is an Algerian mother of three who lives through two difficult periods: French colonialism and national independence. At the height of the War of Liberation, she bravely repels an attempted assault by a traitor masquerading as a freedom fighter, who spreads rumours in the village that her husband was killed by the revolutionaries for treachery. In the post-independence period, she is shunned because of these rumours and forced to leave the village. Her son Abdul Qader Al-Makh is assassinated by the rising extremist Islamic movement. Yet Masouda never gives up, courageously facing the collapse unfolding in the nation. When her other son, Idris, appears to avenge his brother’s murder, the novel suggests that betrayal of the revolution and betrayal of independence are two sides of the same coin.

 Essam El Zayaat is an Egyptian writer and doctor, born in 1993. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Tanta University and is currently pursuing higher studies in Clinical Pathology. He writes and blogs on a number of news websites, as well as writing short stories. He has two published novels: The Dog Who Saw a Rainbow (2024) and Hiding in a Hamster Wheel (2025).

 Hiding in a Hamster Wheel

 In the opening scene of the novel, Ajabi is led by the police to the crime scene to explain how he killed his wife, Inji, so they can determine if it was premeditated, or - as he claims - on the spur of the moment after a fierce argument. His reenactment of the crime fails to convince them, and he appears to be hiding something. The story then goes back in time to uncover the truth, beginning with the arrival of Dr. Imran at Amoun Hospital and his meeting with Ajaibi and Inji. Dr. Imran’s friendly email correspondence with Inji turns romantic, but before their relationship becomes serious, they agree to end it rather than betray Ajaibi. However, it is too late. Ajaibi has already grown suspicious of his wife’s behaviour, and they quarrel. After killing her and looking at her phone, Ajabi feels guilty and decides to accept his lawful punishment without revealing the motive behind his actions. At this point, Imran intervenes, hoping to turn the situation around completely. 

 IPAF Judging panel 2026 — biographies 

 Mohamed Elkadhi is a Tunisian researcher and critic, specialising in Arabic literature and theoretical and applied narratology. He studied at the University of Tunis and received a state doctorate in Arabic literature from Manouba University, Tunisia. He has taught at the University of Tunis since 1983 and served on the judging panels of a number of prizes, including the UAE Sultan Ali Al Owais Cultural Award, the Tunisian COMAR Prize, and the Omani Sultan Qaboos Award. He won the international Ibn Khaldoun-Senghor Translation Award in 2018 and the Taher Haddad Prize for Humanities and Literature in 2023. He is the author of several academic books, including Novel Dialogism (2005); The Novel and History (2008); Challenges of the Arabic Novel: Between Creativity and Universality, co-authored with Said Yaktine (2011); and Sources of Modern Narratology, co-authored with Noureddine Benkhoud (2021). Translations by him include an anthology of Tunisian poetry translated into French (2003); En bas, les nuages, a novel by Marc Dugain translated from French into Arabic (2012); and The Rocking Chair by Tunisian novelist Amal Mokhtar, translated from Arabic into French (2022). 

 Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a Palestinian poet, novelist, translator and writer of children’s stories, born in Beirut. She has published four novels, four poetry collections, and numerous books of children’s stories. She founded and ran the Palestine Writing Association, which seeks to encourage reading and to publish stories and literary resources. She has translated several novels into Arabic and edited a book of short stories entitled The Book of Ramallah (2021) published by Comma Press, London. Her poetry has been translated into English, French and German. In 2022, her poetry collection You Can Be the Last Leaf (2012) was a finalist for the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle in the US, and for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, awarded by Arrowsmith Press in the US. The latter was established to honour the work of Nobel Prize poet Derek Walcott and is awarded annually for a book of poetry by a non-US citizen. Her novel No One Knows Their Blood Type (2013) was translated into English, Italian and Spanish, and shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award and the National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association in 2025. Maya Abu Al-Hayyat lives in occupied Jerusalem.   

 Dheya Alkaabi is a Bahraini academic and critic working in the field of cultural narratives, histories of critical thought, discourse analysis, feminist studies, and narrative studies of classical and modern texts. She has also founded her own cultural narrative project. She obtained a PhD in Philosophy of Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Jordan and is currently Dean of the College of Arts at the University of Bahrain. She has a large collection of peer-reviewed research and several published works, including Classical Arabic Narrative: Cultural Patterns and Problems of Interpretation (2005); Popular Arabic Narratives: Cultural Representation and Interpretation (2014); Polemical Discourse in Arab Culture: Interpretative Approaches (2014); and the five-volume Bahraini Folk Tales: A Thousand and One Tales, A Collective Documentation Project (2019). She has co-authored several edited anthologies and contributed five books to the Wells of Arabic Poetry project published by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre. 

 Laila Hyewon Baek is an assistant professor and head of the Department of Korean and Arabic Languages at the Graduate School of Translation (GSIT) at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in South Korea. She holds MA and PhD degrees in Arabic Language and Literature from the University of Jordan. She has translated a number of Arabic novels, including The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant by Sahar Khalifeh; The Bamboo Stalk by Saud Alsanousi (IPAF 2013 winner); My Early Life by Sultan Al-Qasimi; and The Mu’allaqat for Millennials by Kevin Blankinship and Hatem Alzahrani. She has several published academic papers, including The Transformation of Narrative Discourse in Arabic Literature After the 1967 Defeat (2022); and Problematics of the Self and the Other and Their Metaphorical Manifestations in The Bamboo Stalk (2022).

 Shakir Nouri is an Iraqi journalist, novelist and translator. He obtained a BA degree in English Literature from the University of Baghdad in 1972 and returned to his hometown to work as a secondary school English teacher for four years. In 1977, he emigrated to Paris, where he remained until 2004. Whilst there, he obtained an MA in Media from the École Supérieure des Hautes Études, a BTS degree in Cinematography from Louis Lumière Institute and a PhD in Cinema and Theatre from the Sorbonne University. He has worked as a cultural correspondent for several Iraqi and Arab newspapers and magazines, and at Monte Carlo Radio and the Sorbonne University. He currently works in journalism, media, and as a university teacher in Dubai. He won the Ibn Battuta Award for Travel Literature for his book A Residence Permit in the Tower of Babel: Paris Diaries (2013). He is the author of numerous novels, non-fiction books, and translations into Arabic from English and French. His ninth novel Khatun Baghdad (2016), about explorer Gertrude Bell, won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in the published novel category in 2017.  

 About the prize

The previous winners of the prize are:
2008: Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher (Egypt)