Said Khatibi (credit: IPAF).
By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief
Algerian writer Said Khatibi has won the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel Swimming Against the Tide, published by Hachette Antoine.
Based in Slovenia, Khatibi is the award‑winning author of Forty Years Waiting for Isabel (2016), winner of the 2017 Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel, Firewood of Sarajevo (2018), which was shortlisted for the IPAF in 2020, and The End of the Desert (2022), winner of the 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award.
Khatibi’s winning novel was selected from 137 submitted titles as the best novel published in Arabic between July 2024 and June 2025.
The book follows two parallel stories in Algiers: one involves a female ophthalmologist who restores her patients’ sight with corneas stolen from dead bodies is arrested for the murder of her husband,” while her father, a former freedom fighter, is accused of collaboration with the former French occupier. As the narratives converge, it traces Algeria’s history from the Second World War to the Black Decade of the 1990s.
“Swimming Against the Tide is a captivating novel that lives up to its title, subtly probing the origins of “the Black Decade” in Algeria by swimming against the current of history,” said Tunisian researcher and critic Mohamed Elkadhi, Chair of the 2026 judges, in a release. “Said Khatibi presents us with fragments of a complex, hazy picture that the reader must reconstruct and rearrange in order to arrive at a meaning that encapsulates this elusive historical moment.”
Joining Elkhadi on the judging panel were 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 IPAF celebrates excellence in contemporary Arabic creative writing and seeks to support Arabic literature internationally through the translation and publication of the winning shortlisted or longlisted novels in other major languages. Shortlisted authors are awarded $10,000, and the winner receives an additional $50,000.
The prize is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Center at the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism. The prize is also supported by the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair.
Alongside Khatibi, the 2026 shortlist features novels by Ahmad Abdulatif (Egypt), Najwa Barakat (Lebanon), Doaa Ibrahim (Egypt), Diaa Jubaili (Iraq), and Amin Zaoui (Algeria).
About the AuthorAndrew Albanese