A celebration of Arabic literary translation: Annual lecture of the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic literary translation

Annual Lecture and the Winning Translator of the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

Margaret Litvin, professor and literary translator, will speak on Translating Beauty and Revolt in Arabic Literature Today. Her talk will begin by suggesting that the literary moves that have powered much of Arabic fiction for the past 60-years may no longer work as intended. The shocking formal innovations of the twentieth century may lack their old power to shock: they may now be predictable, even pandering to audience expectations in what Bertolt Brecht would call a “culinary” way. Chief among these is the literature of programmatic ugliness.

The Oedipal rebellion in Arabic letters has succeeded; the adab tradition has somewhat faded from view. And amid the hideous real-world violence of recent decades and especially the past few years, what could be more radical and countercultural than a beautiful person, a beautiful idea, or a beautiful sentence or paragraph? In a context of pervasive ugliness, beauty can be a striking means of revolt. But if it is true that aesthetics have resurfaced as a value in Arabic fiction, then this places new demands on the English translator of Arabic fiction. This lecture will explore those demands and consider some different ways translators respond.

Katharine Halls, who has won the prize for her translation of Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji (McSweeney’s), will be in conversation with the Chair of Judges Raphael Cohen, along with readings from the winning translation and the original Arabic edition.

The welcome drink will be held at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre Foyer at 6:00pm. The event will begin at Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre at 6:30pm. 

About the speakers

Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University, core faculty in the Boston University MFA Program in Literary Translation, and the recipient of ACLS, Humboldt, and Radcliffe fellowships. She is the author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (2011) and of translations from Arabic including Sonallah Ibrahim’s Ice Seagull (2019) and plays by Jawad al-Assadi and Mamduh Adwan. She was a awarded a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant to translate Khalil Alrez’s The Russian Quarter, excerpts of which have appeared in the Oxford UP anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (2023) and in McSweeney’s.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography in the US. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace received a 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and was shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival, and short texts have appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, Africa Is a Country, The Common, Asymptote, Arts of the Working Class, World Literature Today, stadtsprachen, Words Without Borders, Exberliner, Newfound, Adda, Critical Muslim, Perpetual Postponement and various anthologies.

Raphael Cohen was born in Brighton and grew up in south London. A freelance translator in the fields of politics, development, and literature, he studied Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University and the University of Chicago and then worked for nearly ten years with the renowned Egyptian publisher Elias Modern Publishing. He has translated a number of works by contemporary Arab authors who include Abdelmajid Sebbata, Amir Taj el-Sir, Ghalya F T Al Said, George Yarak, Ahlem Mosteghanemi, Mohamed Salmawy, Ahmed Morsi and Mona Prince. He has been living in Cairo since 2006.

About Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation

The prize is an annual award of £3,000 for literary translation from Arabic to English, made to the translator(s) of a published translation in English of a full-length imaginative and creative Arabic work of literary merit published after, or during, the year 1967. It was first awarded in 2006, and was then the only prize in the entire world for published books translated from Arabic.  

The judging panel comprises four judges, two who read only the English translations & two who read both Arabic original and English translation. For 2024, the English transation judge are Laura Watkinson and Michael Caines. And two who read both the Arabic originals and the English translations are Raphael Cohen and Nariman Youssef.

The prize is administered by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom, alongside all other UK prizes for literary translation from languages that include Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish, also the TA First Translation Prize for debut translation into English from any language, and the newly established John Calder Translation Prize for a full-length ambitious, groundbreaking work of literary merit and general interest translated into English from any language. All are administered by the Society of Authors and awarded annually at a joint ceremony hosted by the Society. The prize is wholly sponsored by the Saif Ghobash family in memory of their husband and father, the late Saif Ghobash (21 October 1932 – 25 October 1977). 

The event is hosted by SOAS School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, SOAS Centre for Translation Studies, SOAS Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

Image credit: Defrino Maasy via unsplash