{"id":201633,"date":"2026-04-23T16:13:13","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T16:13:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/201633\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T16:13:13","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T16:13:13","slug":"algerian-writer-wins-2026-international-prize-for-arabic-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/201633\/","title":{"rendered":"Algerian Writer Wins 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Khatibi\u2019s novel was selected from 137 submitted titles as the best novel published in Arabic between July 2024 and June 2025.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\" Said Khatibi (credit: IPAF).<\/p>\n

By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n

Algerian writer Said Khatibi has won the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF)<\/a> for his novel Swimming Against the Tide, published by Hachette Antoine.<\/p>\n

Based in Slovenia, Khatibi is the award\u2011winning 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.<\/p>\n

Khatibi\u2019s winning novel was selected from 137 submitted titles as the best novel published in Arabic between July 2024 and June 2025.<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"The book follows two parallel stories in Algiers: one involves a female ophthalmologist who restores her patients\u2019 sight with corneas stolen from dead bodies is arrested for the murder of her husband,\u201d while her father, a former freedom fighter, is accused of collaboration with the former French occupier. As the narratives converge, it traces Algeria\u2019s history from the Second World War to the Black Decade of the 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u201cSwimming Against the Tide is a captivating novel that lives up to its title, subtly probing the origins of \u201cthe Black Decade\u201d <\/a>in Algeria by swimming against the current of history,\u201d said Tunisian researcher and critic Mohamed Elkadhi, Chair of the 2026 judges, in a release. \u201cSaid 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Alongside Khatibi, the 2026 shortlist features novels by Ahmad Abdulatif (Egypt), Najwa Barakat (Lebanon), Doaa Ibrahim (Egypt), Diaa Jubaili (Iraq), and Amin Zaoui (Algeria).<\/p>\n

About the AuthorAndrew Albanese<\/p>\n

Andrew Richard Albanese is the editor-in-chief of ‘Publishing Perspectives’ and founder and editor of ‘Words & Money,’ a media site that centers the role of libraries in the 21st Century publishing business. A veteran library and publishing industry reporter, he has previously worked for ‘Publishers Weekly’ and ‘Library Journal,’ where he was widely known for his in-depth coverage of the Google Books and Apple E-book price-fixing cases, developments in the digital library market, book bans and freedom to read issues, the open access movement, and copyright issues. He is a former associate editor at Oxford University Press, and the author of ‘The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon, and the Big Six Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Khatibi\u2019s novel was selected from 137 submitted titles as the best novel published in Arabic between July 2024…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[6],"tags":[12007,103061,390,103062,103063,103064],"class_list":["post-201633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-algeria","tag-abu-dhabi","tag-adult-fiction","tag-algeria","tag-book-prizes","tag-international-prize-for-arabic-prize","tag-translation"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@africa\/116454909998452133","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}