Every year, France, Japan, Brazil and more crown their best book. Spin the globe to see which ones you can read in English, and which are still waiting.
4,667 books · 44 prizes · 39 countries
IPAF 2026 · Winner
Ughalib majra al-nahr
Title translated by AI:“I Fight the River's Current”
Said Khatibi · 41 when first published
Novel · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:An eye surgeon and her husband, who runs a hospital mortuary, take corneas from the dead and sell them through her practice; when he is murdered, her questioning brings the secrets of their marriage to light.
IPAF 2026 · Shortlist
Asl al-anwa'
Title translated by AI:“The Origin of Species”
Ahmad Abdulatif · 47 when first published
Novel · 258 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a Cairo close to vanishing, people begin to lose their hair, then their fingers and toes, along with love and anger, while the dead escape their demolished tombs and ghosts walk beside the living.
IPAF 2026 · Shortlist
Manam al-qaylula
Title translated by AI:“Siesta Dream”
Amin Zaoui · 69 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · War, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:During Algeria's independence war, a mother of three fights off an assault by a traitor posing as a resistance fighter, who then spreads the rumour that the rebels killed her husband for treason.
IPAF 2026 · Shortlist
Al-Ra'i
Title translated by AI:“The Seer”
Diaa Jubaili · 48 when first published
Novel · Historical, Speculative
AI-generated summary:Damu the Sumerian, a scribe who cannot die, witnesses and records the history of Mesopotamia from the end of the Sumerian city-states to the 2010s.
IPAF 2026 · Shortlist
Fawqa ra'si sahaba
Title translated by AI:“A Cloud Above My Head”
Doaa Ibrahim · 36 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:From a prison cell, a nurse whose father walked out on her to wed a Japanese woman tells how she came to end the lives of her patients and of everyone who tried to befriend or love her.
IPAF 2026 · Shortlist
Ghaybat Mai
Title translated by AI:“Mai's Absence”
Najwa Barakat · 65 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:Past eighty and alone in a ninth-floor flat in Beirut, looked after by the concierge and her doctor while her sons live abroad, a woman hears a voice call her name one dawn, inside a flat locked behind two doors.
IPAF 2025 · Winner
Salat al-qalaq
Title translated by AI:“The Prayer of Anxiety”
Mohamed Samir Nada · 46 when first published
Novel · War, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 1977 a mysterious object blows up over a forgotten village in Upper Egypt whose people believe a minefield cuts them off from the world, and a strange sickness follows.
IPAF 2025 · Shortlist
Danishmand
Title translated by AI:“Scholar of Scholars”
Ahmed Fal Al Din · 46 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:A novel of the life of the theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, shown not as the familiar icon but as an anxious, searching man in an age of political strife, sectarian feuds and palace intrigue.
IPAF 2025 · Shortlist
Wadi al-farashat
Title translated by AI:“The Valley of Butterflies”
Azher Jirjees · 51 when first published
Novel · 215 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:In Baghdad a sacked government archivist ends up driving a hearse to a graveyard for abandoned children and outcasts, where the dead are said to turn into glowing butterflies.
IPAF 2025 · Shortlist
ميثاق النساء · Mithaq al-nisa'
Haneen Al-Sayegh · 37 when first published
Novel · 336 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:In a conservative Druze village, a young woman whose devout parents stand between her and the American University of Beirut makes a bargain: marriage to a wealthy Druze man in exchange for her freedom.
IPAF 2025 · Shortlist
Malmas al-daw'
Title translated by AI:“The Touch of Light”
Nadia Najar · 50 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:A blind woman uses a phone app that describes photographs to tell the stories behind her family's pictures, and with them the history of Dubai and Bahrain before and after oil.
IPAF 2025 · Shortlist
Al-Masih al-Andalusi
Title translated by AI:“The Andalusian Messiah”
Taissier Khalaf · 57 when first published
Novel · 358 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Spain, 1592: after a Morisco woman is tried and killed by the Inquisition, her son, a devout Catholic, begins to doubt the court's story and the words she left him, that he is an Arab Muslim named Issa ibn Muhammad.
IPAF 2024 · Winner
قناع بلون السماء · Qina' bi-lawn al-sama'
Bassem Khandaqji · 40 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:A Palestinian archaeologist from a camp near Ramallah discovers an Israeli identity card inside a second-hand coat and decides to take on the occupier's identity like a mask.
IPAF 2024 · Shortlist
Muqamara 'ala sharaf al-Lady Mitsi
Title translated by AI:“A Wager on Lady Mitzi's Honour”
Ahmed Al-Morsi · 31 when first published
Novel · 350 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Egypt, early in the twentieth century: a poor Bedouin boy made to ride in a horse race, an English lady, a horse broker and a pensioned-off policeman who bets to cover his ailing wife's care cross paths at the racecourse.
IPAF 2024 · Shortlist
Al-Fusayfisa'i
Title translated by AI:“The Mosaicist”
Eissa Nasiri · 38 when first published
Novel · 453 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Three manuscripts set in the Moroccan town of Oualili, beside the Roman ruins of Volubilis, link the second century, an American writer's hunt for a stolen mosaic in the 1990s and a psychiatrist's notes on two patients.
IPAF 2024 · Shortlist
Sama' al-Quds al-sabi'a
Title translated by AI:“The Seventh Sky of Jerusalem”
Osama Al-Eissa · 60 when first published
Novel · 677 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:In the 1970s Jerusalem, out of its second war in twenty years and close to famine, tries to absorb the shock of a new occupation, seen through the ordinary people of the walled city rather than its slogans.
IPAF 2024 · Shortlist
Bahbel: Makkah Multiverse 1945-2009
Novel · 336 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In an old Mecca family ruled by its father, a boy is born as one of twins, though his twin has vanished; growing up among the family's women, he sets out to write their lives from 1945 to 2009.
IPAF 2024 · Shortlist
خاتم سليمى · Khatam Sulayma
Rima Bali · 53 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Love, War
AI-generated summary:The stories of a Spanish Jewish photographer and an Aleppo woman, who is in love with an Italian musician living in her city, cross between Aleppo and Toledo around an old ring.
IPAF 2023 · Winner
Taghribat al-Qafir
Title translated by AI:“The Exile of the Water Diviner”
Zahran Alqasmi · 48 when first published
Novel · Nature
AI-generated summary:In an Omani village, a man with a gift for tracking water hidden deep underground is called on by village after village to find springs, his whole life bound up with water since his mother drowned.
IPAF 2023 · Shortlist
Hajar al-Saada
Title translated by AI:“The Stone of Happiness”
Azher Jirjees · 49 when first published
Novel · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:After his younger brother drowns in the Tigris at Mosul, the boy Kamal Touma flees his father's fury, picks up a small stone in a dreaded orchard and rides a lorry south to Baghdad.
IPAF 2023 · Shortlist
Al-Ufuq al-Ala
Title translated by AI:“The Highest Horizon”
Fatima Abdulhamid · 40 when first published
Novel · Satire, Love
AI-generated summary:Azrael, the angel of death, tells the reader about the people he visits, among them Suleiman, a widower in his fifties who has always lived in the care of women and falls for a neighbour he glimpses from his balcony.
IPAF 2023 · Shortlist
Ayyam al-Shams al-Mushriqa
Title translated by AI:“Days of the Shining Sun”
Miral al-Tahawy · 54 when first published
Novel · Migration
AI-generated summary:In Shining Sun, an imaginary small town on the southwestern border of America where workers and migrants are smuggled in every day, the novel follows people on the margins of Western society.
IPAF 2023 · Shortlist
Konshirto Qurina Idwardo
Najwa Bin Shatwan · 52 when first published
Novel · Coming of age, Family, War
AI-generated summary:A Libyan girl from a family of Greek origin grows up from the 1970s to the civil war of 2014, as politics, revolution and war reshape her family and her country.
IPAF 2023 · Shortlist
Manna
Title translated by AI:“Drought”
Siddik Hadj-Ahmed · 54 when first published
Novel · Migration, War, Politics
AI-generated summary:A Tuareg refugee who fled the 1973 drought in northern Mali tells his life and his son's in a manuscript, later found stained in a box, covering the forty years before Gaddafi's fall.
IPAF 2022 · Winner
خبز على طاولة الخال ميلاد · Khubz ala Tawilat al-Khal Milad
Mohammed Alnaas · 30 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Family, Love
AI-generated summary:In a closed village society, Milad keeps failing to be the man everyone expects, until his beloved Zeinab helps him stop trying: he runs the household while she earns their living.
IPAF 2022 · Shortlist
Dilshad: Sirat al-Ju wa-l-Shiba
Title translated by AI:“Dilshad: A Life of Hunger and Plenty”
Bushra Khalfan · 52 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In Muscat in the first half of the twentieth century, Dilshad, a boy of unknown parentage, grows up poor in a Baloch quarter; years later, blind and desperate, he sends his daughter Maryam to work in a merchant's house.
IPAF 2022 · Shortlist
Al-Khatt al-Abyad min al-Layl
Title translated by AI:“The White Line of the Night”
Khalid Al-Nasrallah · 34 when first published
Novel · Politics, Speculative
AI-generated summary:A man obsessed with words since childhood becomes a censor of books and suffers each time he must ban one, in a country where the authorities are at war with their own people.
IPAF 2022 · Shortlist
Asir al-Burtughaliyyin
Title translated by AI:“The Prisoner of the Portuguese”
Mohsine Loukili · 43 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:A poor man from Fez leaves home to look for work and ends up a prisoner in a Portuguese fort on the African coast, where he must tell his jailer a story that pleases him or be executed.
IPAF 2022 · Shortlist
يوميات روز · Yawmiyyat Ruz
Reem al-Kamali · 49 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Coming of age, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1960s Dubai, before the UAE exists, a young woman who loves books is barred from studying literature in Damascus and pours her anger into secret diaries, which she throws into the creek once they are full.
IPAF 2022 · Shortlist
Makit al-Qahira
Title translated by AI:“Cairo Maquette”
Tareq Imam · 44 when first published
Novel · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:In 2045 an independent Cairo gallery for art from the margins offers a grant to build a small model of the city as it was in 2020, when it was still Egypt's capital.
IPAF 2021 · Winner
دفاتر الورّاق · Dafatir al-Warraq
Jalal Barjas · 50 when first published
Novel · 324 pages
AI-generated summary:Ibrahim, a well-read bookseller, slips into the identities of characters from the novels he loves; lonely and mistreated, he sinks into mental illness until he meets a woman who changes his fate.
IPAF 2021 · Shortlist
الملف 42 · Al-Malaff 42
Abdelmajid Sebbata · 31 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:An American novelist and a young Moroccan doctoral student hunt for the unknown author of a forgotten 1989 Moroccan novel in which the novelist's father, once a soldier at a US base in Morocco, appears.
IPAF 2021 · Shortlist
Ayn Hammurabi
Title translated by AI:“The Eye of Hammurabi”
Abdulatif Ould Abdullah · 32 when first published
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:A man who fled an angry crowd after robbing a saint's tomb for antiquities with a German friend is interrogated in a military barracks and offered protection in return for a full confession.
IPAF 2021 · Shortlist
نازلة دار الأكابر · Nazilat Dar al-Akabir
Amira Ghenim · 42 when first published
Novel · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:A novel that imagines a love between the Tunisian reformer Tahar Haddad and a woman named Lella Zbaida, and lets women narrators tell a hidden chapter of the country's modern history.
IPAF 2021 · Shortlist
وشم الطائر · Washm al-Tair
Dunya Mikhail · 55 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · War, Love
AI-generated summary:Helen and Elias, a Yazidi couple in Iraq, find love and wed before ISIS overtakes their lives and sells Yazidi women, in a story steeped in Yazidi customs and folk tales.
IPAF 2021 · Shortlist
Al-Ishtiyaq ila al-Jara
Title translated by AI:“Longing for the Woman Next Door”
Habib Selmi · 69 when first published
Novel · Love
AI-generated summary:A sixty-year-old Tunisian, well educated and with a foreign wife, and a younger Tunisian woman of modest background in the same building drift from his guarded condescension into an unusual relationship.
IPAF 2020 · Winner
Al-Diwan al-Isbarti
Title translated by AI:“The Spartan Court”
Abdelouahab Aissaoui · 33 when first published
Novel · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Between 1815 and 1833, five lives cross in Algiers: a French reporter and a former soldier of Napoleon who help prepare the invasion, and three Algerians divided over how to deal with the Ottomans and the French.
IPAF 2020 · Shortlist
Al-Tanki
Title translated by AI:“The Tank”
Alia Mamdouh · 75 when first published
Novel
AI-generated summary:After four decades of exile, a writer imagines returning to Iraq and sets out to trace the great changes her country and its society have been through, a journey she shares with her characters.
IPAF 2020 · Shortlist
ملك الهند · Malik al-Hind
Jabbour Douaihy · 70 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Crime, Family
AI-generated summary:Days after coming home to the village of Tel Safra from long years abroad, carrying a painting by Chagall, Zakaria Mubarak is found murdered at the edge of the village.
IPAF 2020 · Shortlist
Al-Hayy al-Rusi
Title translated by AI:“The Russian Quarter”
Khalil Alrez · 63 when first published
Novel · War
AI-generated summary:For years a city neighbourhood known as the Russian Quarter keeps out of the war raging around it, until it is forced in and takes part with stories rather than weapons.
IPAF 2020 · Shortlist
حطب سراييفو · Hatab Sarajevo
Said Khatibi · 35 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · War, Migration
AI-generated summary:Salim from Algeria and Ivana from Bosnia have each fled a civil war at home and try to start again in Slovenia, where the wars they escaped keep following them.
IPAF 2020 · Shortlist
Fardaqan: Itiqal al-Shaykh al-Rais
Title translated by AI:“Fardaqan: The Detention of the Great Sheikh”
Youssef Ziedan · 60 when first published
Novel · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of Avicenna, the polymath called the Great Sheikh, from his birth close to Bukhara to his death in Persia; after two terms as vizier he is locked away in the isolated castle of Fardaqan.
IPAF 2019 · Winner
بريد الليل · Barid al-layl
Hoda Barakat · 66 when first published
Novel · 208 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Exiles and migrants with no names, from countries the book never names, write letters that never reach the people they were meant for, and each letter is found by the next writer.
IPAF 2019 · Shortlist
Al-Wasaya
Title translated by AI:“The Commandments”
Adel Esmat · 59 when first published
Novel · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:In December 1978, the old Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Salim tells his grandson he will die in two days, and hands down to him ten commandments distilled from a long life.
Also: Sawiris 2019 winner
IPAF 2019 · Shortlist
Al-Nabidha
Title translated by AI:“The Outcast”
Inaam Kachachi · 65 when first published
Novel · 325 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Taj al-Muluk, a journalist who ran the first magazine in Baghdad under the monarchy, is drawn into anti-government activity and leaves to work for an Arabic radio station in Karachi.
IPAF 2019 · Shortlist
Shams bayda' barida
Title translated by AI:“Cold White Sun”
Kafa Al-Zou'bi · 53 when first published
Novel · 318 pages
AI-generated summary:A poor, bookish young Jordanian of Bedouin stock, estranged from his conservative family, teaches in Amman and rents a squalid windowless room where its previous tenant, an old lottery-ticket seller, died unnoticed.
IPAF 2019 · Shortlist
Bi-ayy dhanb rahalat?
Title translated by AI:“For What Sin Did She Leave?”
Mohammed Al-Maazuz · 59 when first published
Novel · Family
AI-generated summary:Divorced but unbowed, Rahil, a musician who finds refuge in Sartre and Beauvoir, resolves to face the world again through music, as her mother once did through painting.
IPAF 2019 · Shortlist
صيف مع العدو · Sayf ma'a al-'aduww
Shahla Ujayli · 42 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Family, War, Migration
AI-generated summary:Having fled the war in Syria, Lamis arrives in Cologne to meet Nicholas, a Munich professor who once spent a summer in her home town of Raqqa and fell in love with her mother.
IPAF 2018 · Winner
Harb al-kalb al-thaniya
Title translated by AI:“The Second War of the Dog”
Ibrahim Nasrallah · 62 when first published
Novel · 343 pages · Speculative, Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Drawing on the fantastic and on science fiction, the story follows a man who once stood against the regime and becomes a corrupt extremist, in a society where greed has swept away every moral limit and even people's fates and souls are for sale.
IPAF 2018 · Shortlist
زهور تأكلها النار · Zuhur ta'kuluha al-nar
Amir Tag Elsir · 56 when first published
Novel · 189 pages · War, Politics
AI-generated summary:Khamila, beautiful and rich, comes home from her studies in Egypt to the cosmopolitan town of al-Sur just as a group of religious zealots appears on its walls and then seizes the town.
IPAF 2018 · Shortlist
الحالة الحرجة للمدعو "ك" · Al-Hala al-harija lil-mad'u K
Aziz Mohammed · 30 when first published
Novel · 266 pages
AI-generated summary:After reading Kafka, a man known only as K decides to keep a diary, but keeps running up against his limited talent, his uneventful life and his wish to guard his privacy, until a piece of news upends everything.
IPAF 2018 · Shortlist
الخائفون · Al-Kha'ifun
Dima Wannous · 35 when first published
Novel · 176 pages
AI-generated summary:Suleima, anxious, reads the pages that Naseem has sent her and finds an unfinished novel about a woman made of fear, just like her, and wonders whether he wants her to write its ending.
IPAF 2018 · Shortlist
ساعة بغداد · Sa'at Baghdad
Shahad Al Rawi · 30 when first published
Novel · 272 pages · Coming of age, War
AI-generated summary:In 1991, as coalition planes bomb Baghdad, a young girl meets her best friend in an air-raid shelter, and the two begin to share their hopes, dreams and fantasies.
IPAF 2018 · Shortlist
Warith al-shawahid
Title translated by AI:“Heir of the Tombstones”
Walid Shurafa · 44 when first published
Novel · 159 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:From a prison cell on Mount Carmel, the Palestinian al-Wahid remembers his childhood in the 1967 war and his family's forced departure from their village, Ein Hawd, which Israel turned into an artists' village.
IPAF 2017 · Winner
موت صغير · Mawt saghir
Mohammed Hasan Alwan · 37 when first published
Novel · 426 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:An imagined life of the Sufi master Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi, from his birth in al-Andalus in the twelfth century through a lifetime of journeys across the Islamic world.
IPAF 2017 · Shortlist
أولاد الغيتو - اسمي آدم · Awlad al-ghitu: Ismi Adam
Elias Khoury · 68 when first published
Novel · Historical, War · Awlad al-ghitu, book 1
AI-generated summary:In New York, Adam Dannoun, a Palestinian emigrant, abandons the novel he is trying to write and turns to his own story: a childhood in Lydda, whose people were driven out in 1948.
IPAF 2017 · Shortlist
السبيليات · Al-Sabiliyat
Ismail Fahd Ismail · 76 when first published
Novel · 176 pages · War, Nature
AI-generated summary:During the Iran–Iraq War the rivers feeding the palm groves along the Shatt al-Arab are dammed with earth, yet one green strip survives at al-Sabiliyat, kept alive by an old woman.
IPAF 2017 · Shortlist
في غرفة العنكبوت · Fi ghurfat al-'ankabut
Muhammad Abdelnabi · 39 when first published
Novel · 264 pages
AI-generated summary:Hani Mahfouz, acquitted after his arrest in the 2001 Queen Boat case in Cairo, leaves prison a broken man who has lost his voice, and begins to write every day about everything.
IPAF 2017 · Shortlist
زرايب العبيد · Zarayib al-'abid
Najwa Bin Shatwan · 46 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:In Libya, a young master, Muhammad, falls in love with the slave Ta'wida, a bond his family will not tolerate, and when he is sent away on a trading journey they set out to undo it.
IPAF 2017 · Shortlist
Maqtal ba'i' al-kutub
Title translated by AI:“The Killing of the Bookseller”
Saad Mohammed Raheem · 59 when first published
Novel · 216 pages · Crime, Politics
AI-generated summary:Hired by a wealthy patron who keeps his name secret, the journalist Majid Baghdadi spends two months in Baqubah to write a book on the life and murder of Mahmoud al-Marzouq, a seventy-year-old bookseller and painter.
IPAF 2016 · Winner
مصائر: كونشرتو الهولوكوست والنكبة · Masa'ir: Kunshirtu al-Hulukust wa-l-Nakba
Rabai al-Madhoun · 70 when first published
Novel · 264 pages · Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:After scattering part of her Armenian mother's ashes on the Thames, Julie keeps the rest to take back to Palestine, and sets out from London with her Palestinian husband Walid.
IPAF 2016 · Shortlist
حارس الموتى · Haris al-mawta
George Yaraq · 57 when first published
Novel · 244 pages · War
AI-generated summary:Early in the Lebanese civil war, Abir trains as a sniper, but the unexplained death of his closest friend scares him off the barracks and into a life of drifting, until he finds work in a hospital morgue.
IPAF 2016 · Shortlist
مديح لنساء العائلة · Madih li-nisa' al-'a'ila
Mahmoud Shukair · 74 when first published
Novel · 240 pages · Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:The women of the Abd al-Lat clan, newly settled near Jerusalem, set tongues wagging as they shed the old ways, while Muhammad, son of the ageing patriarch Mannan, writes the clan's history in their honour.
IPAF 2016 · Shortlist
عطارد · 'Utarid
Mohammad Rabie · 37 when first published
Novel · 352 pages · Speculative, Politics
AI-generated summary:More than a decade after the police were routed on 28 January 2011, Egypt is under a mysterious occupation, and Otared, a police officer, joins what is left of the old force leading a resistance in the ruins of Cairo.
IPAF 2016 · Shortlist
سماء قريبة من بيتنا · Sama' qariba min baytina
Shahla Ujayli · 39 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Love, War, Family
AI-generated summary:In Amman, Joumane Badran, whose roots are in Raqqa, meets Nasser al-Amiri, who has come to bury his mother, and the two discover that their grandfathers' houses in Aleppo stood side by side.
IPAF 2016 · Shortlist
Numidya
Tareq Bakari · 27 when first published
Novel · 422 pages · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:Julia, a Frenchwoman, writes the story of her Moroccan lover Murad, a foundling despised and beaten in the village where he was found, who has turned to love as a way of taking revenge on fate.
IPAF 2015 · Winner
الطلياني · al-Talyani
Shukri Mabkhout · 52 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:At his father's funeral, Abdel Nasser, nicknamed the Italian, attacks his neighbour, the imam, in front of stunned mourners. A friend reconstructs his life from childhood to find out why.
Also: Comar d'Or 2015 winner
IPAF 2015 · Shortlist
Mamarr al-Safsaf
Title translated by AI:“Willow Alley”
Ahmed al-Madeeni · 67 when first published
Novel · 382 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In a new neighbourhood rising out of an old Moroccan city, people try to live side by side at the mercy of a few arrogant tyrants, while the caretaker of a building under construction fights for his place.
IPAF 2015 · Shortlist
Hayat Mu'allaqa
Title translated by AI:“A Suspended Life”
Atef Abu Saif · 42 when first published
Novel · Politics, War
AI-generated summary:Naim, who owns the only printing press in a Gaza refugee camp and prints the posters of its martyrs, is killed by an army bullet, and his son refuses to let a poster be printed for him.
IPAF 2015 · Shortlist
شوق الدرويش · Shawq al-Darwish
Novel · 304 pages · Historical, Love, War
AI-generated summary:As Egyptian troops backed by the British overthrow the Mahdist state in Sudan, the former slave Bakhit Mandil walks out of prison, determined to take revenge on everyone who caused his imprisonment.
IPAF 2015 · Shortlist
طابق 99 · Tabiq 99
Jana Elhassan · 29 when first published
Novel · 264 pages · War, Love, Migration
AI-generated summary:In New York in 2000, Majd, a Palestinian scarred by the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, loves Hilda, a dancer from a Lebanese Christian family on the other side of the war, who decides to return to her village.
IPAF 2015 · Shortlist
Almas wa-Nisa'
Title translated by AI:“Diamonds and Women”
Lina Huyan Elhassan · 39 when first published
Novel · 239 pages · Migration, Family, Historical
AI-generated summary:Almaz, a Christian woman from Damascus, marries Count Karam Khoury, a Lebanese living in Paris, and a love story carries her across the Atlantic to São Paulo, where she builds a world among the Arab emigrants.
IPAF 2014 · Winner
فرانكشتاين في بغداد · Frankenstein fi Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi · 40 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Speculative, War
AI-generated summary:In Baghdad in 2005, junk dealer Hadi al-Attag stitches the body parts of bombing victims into one corpse. When a wandering soul enters it, the creature rises to take revenge on those who killed each of its parts.
Also: International Booker 2018 shortlist
IPAF 2014 · Shortlist
Taghribat al-'Abdi al-Mashhur bi-Wild al-Hamriyya
Title translated by AI:“The Wanderings of al-Abdi, Known as Son of al-Hamriyya”
Abdelrahim Lahbibi · 63 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A researcher comes across an old manuscript telling of al-Abdi's journey from Morocco to the Hijaz in search of learning, and after failing to have it edited as a university thesis, decides to edit it himself.
IPAF 2014 · Shortlist
al-Fil al-Azraq
Title translated by AI:“The Blue Elephant”
Ahmed Mourad · 34 when first published
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:After five years of self-imposed isolation, the psychiatrist Yehia returns to Cairo's Abbasiya mental hospital, where, in the ward that decides the fate of accused criminals, he finds an old friend whose future now lies in his hands.
IPAF 2014 · Shortlist
طشاري · Tashari
Inaam Kachachi · 61 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Migration, Family, War
AI-generated summary:Wardiya Iskandar, a doctor who worked in the villages of southern Iraq in the 1950s, ends up in Paris while her children are scattered across three continents, and her grandson builds the family a cemetery on the internet.
IPAF 2014 · Shortlist
لا سكاكين في مطابخ هذه المدينة · La Sakakin fi Matabikh Hadhihi al-Madina
Khaled Khalifa · 49 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Over half a century of dictatorship in Syria, the members of one family in Aleppo watch every one of their dreams die, living side by side with fear, oppression and stifled desires.
IPAF 2014 · Shortlist
طائر أزرق نادر يحلق معي · Ta'ir Azraq Nadir Yuhalliq Ma'i
Youssef Fadel · 64 when first published
Novel · 248 pages · Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:On his wedding night, air force pilot Aziz leaves his sixteen-year-old bride Zina at dawn and vanishes. For years she searches prisons, offices and towns for him, until a stranger slips a note into her pocket.
IPAF 2013 · Winner
ساق البامبو · Saq al-Bambu
Saud Alsanousi · 31 when first published
Novel · 377 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:José, the son of a Kuwaiti father and a Filipina maid, is sent away as a baby and grows up poor in the Philippines, dreaming of the land his mother called paradise, until at eighteen he can go back to Kuwait.
IPAF 2013 · Shortlist
Sa'adatuhu... al-Sayyid al-Wazir
Title translated by AI:“His Excellency the Minister”
Hussein al-Wad · 63 when first published
Novel · 264 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:A Tunisian schoolteacher unexpectedly becomes a government minister, and from his new office sees the corruption spreading through the country and its institutions.
IPAF 2013 · Shortlist
مولانا · Mawlana
Ibrahim Essa · 47 when first published
Novel · 488 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Sheikh Hatem al-Shenawi, a witty preacher and the regular guest of a television show, has grown rich by giving viewers answers that please the public and state security rather than his own convictions.
IPAF 2013 · Shortlist
أنا، هي والأخريات · Ana, Hiya wa-l-Ukhrayat
Jana Elhassan · 27 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Sahar grows up lonely in a cold household and wants a different life from her mother's, but her marriage to Sami leads her into the same trap, and she takes refuge in an imagined companion.
IPAF 2013 · Shortlist
al-Qundus
Title translated by AI:“The Beaver”
Mohammed Hasan Alwan · 32 when first published
Novel · 319 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:At forty and disillusioned, Ghalib al-Wajzi leaves Riyadh for Portland, Oregon. Fishing on the Willamette River in the company of a beaver, he goes back over three generations of his fractured family.
IPAF 2013 · Shortlist
يا مريم · Ya Maryam
Sinan Antoon · 45 when first published
Novel · 136 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Over a single day in Baghdad, two members of an Iraqi Christian family share a house: Youssef, an old man who refuses to leave the home he built, and Maha, a young woman uprooted by sectarian violence who waits to emigrate.
IPAF 2012 · Winner
Duruz Bilghrad
Title translated by AI:“The Druze of Belgrade”
Rabee Jaber · 39 when first published
Novel · 239 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:After the 1860 civil war on Mount Lebanon, Hanna Yaqub, a Christian egg seller from Beirut, is forced to replace a Druze prisoner freed for a bribe and shipped with exiled Druze fighters to the fortress of Belgrade.
IPAF 2012 · Shortlist
Dumyat al-Nar
Title translated by AI:“The Doll of Fire”
Bachir Mefti · 41 when first published
Novel · 165 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Years after the mysterious Reda Chaouch vanished, a novelist receives the manuscript of his life. The son of a prison director, Chaouch swore never to resemble his father, yet was drawn into a group that operates in the shadows.
IPAF 2012 · Shortlist
عناق عند جسر بروكلين · 'Inaq 'inda Jisr Bruklin
Ezzedine C. Fishere · 45 when first published
Novel · 168 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:In New York, Darwish, an Egyptian professor, prepares a party for his granddaughter Salma's twenty-first birthday, and the relatives and friends he has invited, emigrants linked to him and to each other, make their way to the celebration.
IPAF 2012 · Shortlist
Nisa' al-Basatin
Title translated by AI:“The Women of al-Basatin”
Habib Selmi · 59 when first published
Novel · 207 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:After five years abroad, a Tunisian man comes home and spends ten days in his married brother's flat in al-Basatin, a district of Tunis, watching the women around him and a society torn between tradition and modernity.
IPAF 2012 · Shortlist
Sharid al-Manazil
Title translated by AI:“The Vagrant”
Jabbour Douaihy · 61 when first published
Novel · 257 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Nizam, born to a Muslim family but raised by a Christian one, belongs to no sect or region. As a young man he throws himself into the free, restless Beirut of the 1960s and early 1970s, before the city falls apart.
IPAF 2012 · Shortlist
al-'Atil
Title translated by AI:“The Unemployed”
Nasser Iraq · 50 when first published
Novel · 335 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:An educated young Egyptian from a modest family finds no work in Cairo and leaves for Dubai, where a world of new people and nationalities opens up to him, along with the kindness and meanness of friends and relatives.
IPAF 2011 · Winner
القوس والفراشة · Al-Qaws wa-l-farasha
Mohammed Achaari · 59 when first published
Novel · 335 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Youssef al-Firsiwi, a Moroccan journalist and former left-wing activist, receives an anonymous letter telling him that his son, sent to Paris to study architecture, has died a martyr in Afghanistan.
IPAF 2011 · Winner
طوق الحمام · Tawq al-hamam
Novel · Crime
AI-generated summary:When the naked body of a young woman is found in an alley of Abu al-Ruus, an old quarter of Mecca, a police officer tries to find her killer, while the neighbourhood itself tells the story.
IPAF 2011 · Shortlist
صائد اليرقات · Sa'id al-yaraqat
Amir Tag Elsir · 50 when first published
Novel · 133 pages · Satire, Politics
AI-generated summary:Forced to retire after losing a leg in an accident, a former intelligence agent decides to write a novel about his years of spying and starts frequenting the writers' café he once kept under watch.
IPAF 2011 · Shortlist
معذّبتي · Mu'adhdhibati
Bensalem Himmich · 62 when first published
Novel · 244 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:Hamouda, an innocent man, is abducted and locked in a secret prison run by Americans, where Arab and foreign interrogators alike question and torture him.
IPAF 2011 · Shortlist
Raqsa sharqiyya
Title translated by AI:“An Oriental Dance”
Khaled al-Berry · 38 when first published
Novel · 593 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:A young Egyptian marries an older British woman and moves to England, where he comes to know the struggles and relationships of the Arab immigrant community.
IPAF 2011 · Shortlist
بروكلين هايتس · Brooklyn Heights
Miral al-Tahawy · 42 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Hind, an Egyptian poet and single mother, emigrates to New York with her seven-year-old son and settles among refugees and first-generation Arab immigrants in Brooklyn.
IPAF 2010 · Winner
ترمي بشرر · Tarmi bi-sharar
Abdo Khal · 47 when first published
Novel · 368 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A man from a wretched Jeddah neighbourhood confesses his years in the service of the rich owner of the vast palace built in its midst, where his job is to punish his master's enemies.
IPAF 2010 · Shortlist
'Indama tashikh al-dhi'ab
Title translated by AI:“When the Wolves Grow Old”
Jamal Naji · 54 when first published
Novel · 354 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In Amman, one narrator after another tells how people from the city's poor quarters rose to wealth and power among preachers, charities and politicians, while Azmi al-Wajih, at the centre of it all, never speaks.
IPAF 2010 · Shortlist
Wara' al-firdaws
Title translated by AI:“Beyond Paradise”
Mansoura Ez Eldin · 33 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Salma, an editor at a literary paper in Egypt, starts writing a novel about her well-off rural family to free herself from a past full of painful memories.
IPAF 2010 · Shortlist
يوم غائم في البر الغربي · Yawm gha'im fi al-barr al-gharbi
Mohamed Mansi Qandil · 63 when first published
Novel · 392 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Fleeing a violent husband, a mother changes her small daughter's name and leaves her at a convent in Asyut; the girl grows up to be a translator in the Egypt of great archaeological finds and nationalist struggle.
IPAF 2010 · Shortlist
السيدة من تل أبيب · Al-Sayyida min Tal Abib
Rabai al-Madhoun · 64 when first published
Novel · Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:Walid Dahman, a Palestinian exile settled in London, flies to Tel Aviv to see his family in Gaza for the first time since 1967, and finds himself seated next to an Israeli artist, Dana Ahuva.
IPAF 2010 · Shortlist
Amrika
Rabee Jaber · 37 when first published
Novel · 431 pages · Migration, Historical
AI-generated summary:Early in the twentieth century, Marta sets out alone from Greater Syria for New York to find her husband, who has stopped sending news.
IPAF 2009 · Winner
عزازيل · Azazil
Youssef Ziedan · 50 when first published
Novel · 312 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In the fifth century, Hypa, an Egyptian monk, leaves Upper Egypt for Alexandria to study medicine and theology and, urged on by Azazeel, the devil within him, writes down his wanderings and his doubts.
IPAF 2009 · Shortlist
Al-Mutarjim al-kha'in
Title translated by AI:“The Treacherous Translator”
Fawaz Haddad · 61 when first published
Novel · 488 pages · Satire
AI-generated summary:Hamed, a literary translator, is branded a traitor for his unorthodox ideas about what translation is for, and is drawn into a web of writers, journalists and critics.
IPAF 2009 · Shortlist
روائح ماري كلير · Rawa'ih Mari Klir
Habib Selmi · 57 when first published
Novel · 223 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Mahfoudh, an Arab man, and Marie-Claire, a Western woman, fall in love and share a flat, and the small habits of everyday life slowly reveal how fragile their bond is.
IPAF 2009 · Shortlist
زمن الخيول البيضاء · Zaman al-khuyul al-bayda'
Ibrahim Nasrallah · 53 when first published
Novel · 634 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Following three generations of one family in a single Palestinian village, the novel traces Palestinian life from late Ottoman rule through the British Mandate to the Nakba of 1948.
IPAF 2009 · Shortlist
الحفيدة الأميركية · Al-Hafida al-amrikiyya
Inaam Kachachi · 56 when first published
Novel · 182 pages · War, Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Zeina, an Iraqi-born American, returns to Iraq after the 2003 invasion as an interpreter for the US Army and finds herself torn between the two countries she belongs to.
IPAF 2009 · Shortlist
جوع · Ju'
Mohamed El-Bisatie · 70 when first published
Novel · 117 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a poor village in the Egyptian countryside, the Zaghloul family lives with hunger every day, scraping together something to eat from one day to the next.
IPAF 2008 · Winner
واحة الغروب · Wahat al-ghurub
Bahaa Taher · 71 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:After the failed Urabi revolt of 1882, Egyptian police officer Mahmoud Abd el-Zahir is sent to govern the remote Siwa oasis as a punishment, and his Irish wife Catherine insists on coming with him.
IPAF 2008 · Shortlist
Ard al-Yambus
Title translated by AI:“Land of Limbo”
Elias Farkouh · 59 when first published
Novel · 233 pages · Autofiction, Politics
AI-generated summary:Lying ill in hospital, a teacher and journalist who is about to become a full-time writer looks back on a life spent on the margins of politics, love and the wars of his region.
IPAF 2008 · Shortlist
مطر حزيران · Matar Huzayran
Jabbour Douaihy · 57 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Years after his father was killed in a massacre in their northern Lebanese village church in June 1957, Elia Kfoury returns from the United States to find out who he really is.
IPAF 2008 · Shortlist
مديح الكراهية · Madih al-karahiya
Khaled Khalifa · 42 when first published
Novel · 299 pages · Politics, Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:In Aleppo in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a young woman grows up in a house of unmarried aunts as the fight between Islamists and the Syrian regime fills the city with hatred.
IPAF 2008 · Shortlist
Anta'il al-ghubar wa-amshi
Title translated by AI:“I Wear the Dust and Walk”
May Menassa · 67 when first published
Novel · 253 pages · War, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:A girl who loses her mother and her voice when gunmen attack her Lebanese village grows up mute, and writes down in a secret notebook everything she cannot say.
IPAF 2008 · Shortlist
تغريدة البجعة · Taghridat al-baja'a
Mekkawi Said · 52 when first published
Novel · Love, Politics
AI-generated summary:In downtown Cairo, Mustafa, a would-be poet who never made it, drifts between the café, the foreigners and the street children of the neighbourhood, haunted by the women he could not keep.