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
Sawiris 2025 · Winner
'Usur Daniyal fi madinat al-khuyut
Title translated by AI:“The Ages of Daniel in the City of Threads”
Ahmad Abdulatif · 44 when first published
Novel · 279 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a city under a heavy punishment, people have turned into puppets who still fear being killed, losing their children and drowning in endless rain, while Daniel sits writing page after page.
Sawiris 2024 · Winner
Kutsika
Novel · Historical, Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:The story of a Greek family in Egypt: Theochari Kozika leaves Greece for Alexandria, witnesses the city's massacre and the British occupation, and with his brother founds the Middle East's first distillery.
Sawiris 2023 · Winner
Raqs al-ibil
Title translated by AI:“The Dance of the Camels”
Fathy Imbaby · 73 when first published
Novel · 402 pages · Love, War, Historical
AI-generated summary:In Kordofan, Al-Talab, a young camel herder of the Hamar, loves his cousin Misk al-Janna, but while he is away with the herds his grandfather marries her to the son of El Obeid's judge in exchange for land.
Sawiris 2021 · Winner
Khuyut aqmishat al-dhat
Title translated by AI:“The Threads of the Fabrics of the Self”
Adel Asaad El-Miry · 66 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:With his working life behind him, a man looks back at his childhood and adolescence in Egypt and traces what shaped his mind, from what he inherited from his forebears to his first ideas.
Sawiris 2021 · Winner
'Ankabut fi al-qalb
Title translated by AI:“A Spider in the Heart”
Mohamed Abouzeid · 38 when first published
Novel · 218 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Two people living on the edges of life meet by chance and find themselves facing a strange, fantastical world; one of them, Mervat, cleans her neighbours' walls only to rescue the spiders.
Sawiris 2020 · Winner
Al-Zawja al-maksikiyya
Title translated by AI:“The Mexican Wife”
Iman Yehia · 64 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Love, Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1953 and 1954 a young Egyptian writer and Ruth, a daughter of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, fall in love and marry, while Egypt is torn between democracy and dictatorship.
Sawiris 2020 · Shortlist
Hisn al-turab
Title translated by AI:“The Fortress of Dust”
Ahmad Abdulatif · 39 when first published
Novel · 265 pages · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:Through the de Molina family, the story of Spain's Moriscos, forced to choose between giving up their faith and exile, then tortured, expelled as Arabs and Muslims, and shunned in their new land as Spanish Christians.
Sawiris 2020 · Shortlist
بيت القبطية · Bayt al-qibtiyya
Ashraf El-Ashmawi · 53 when first published
Novel · 224 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:An investigating magistrate looking into a few crimes in a small village in northern Upper Egypt is faced with worse: motiveless killings, suspicious suicides and fields and houses that burn for no clear reason.
Sawiris 2020 · Shortlist
Ghuyum faransiyya
Title translated by AI:“French Clouds”
Doha Assy · 49 when first published
Novel · 287 pages
AI-generated summary:Cairo under the French occupation, around 1800: when rebels storm the Christian quarter of Azbakiyya, a man named Yaqub hits on an unlikely way to stop a massacre: the buffalo of the oil presses.
Sawiris 2020 · Shortlist
Janaza jadida li-'Imad Hamdi
Title translated by AI:“A New Funeral for Imad Hamdi”
Waheed al-Taweela · 59 when first published
Novel · 303 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:A police officer with an artist's soul, pushed into the police academy by his father, moves through an underworld of killers, informers, thugs and prostitutes, torn between his art and the crime and corruption he fights.
Sawiris 2020 · Shortlist
Kimiya
Walid Alaa El-Din · 46 when first published
Novel · 233 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Kimiya, a girl raised in the house of the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, is given in marriage to his master Shams al-Din Tabrizi, forty-eight years her senior, and soon falls ill.
Sawiris 2019 · Winner
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: IPAF 2019 shortlist
Sawiris 2018 · Winner
Al-Mawluda
Title translated by AI:“Née”
Nonfiction · 551 pages · Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:The life of the author's mother, born in Cairo to an Egyptian Jewish father and an Italian Christian mother, who joined the communist underground, went to prison, married an Egyptian journalist and wrote for women's causes.
Sawiris 2018 · Winner
Misk al-tall
Title translated by AI:“Musk of the Hill”
Sahar El-Mougy · 54 when first published
Novel · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Amina steps out of her ordinary life into a strange house full of women, Catherine, Lucy, Ophelia and others, who may be ghosts or only stories, as the walls between eras begin to fall.
Sawiris 2017 · Winner
Al-'Ushb
Title translated by AI:“The Grass”
Novel · 460 pages · War, Historical
AI-generated summary:Two voices tell of uprooting and survival in Sudan: a holy man who walks thousands of miles to make the pilgrimage, a family held in quarantine, and villages torn apart by famine, locusts and war.
Sawiris 2017 · Winner
Baulu
Youssef Rakha · 40 when first published
Novel · 160 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:A blog posted as the 2013 sit-ins of the deposed president's supporters are broken up holds the testimony of a Cairo photographer and bookshop manager, active in the revolution since 2011, who also informs for State Security.
Sawiris 2016 · Winner
Ma'bad anamil al-harir
Title translated by AI:“The Temple of Silken Fingertips”
Ibrahim Farghali · 48 when first published
Novel · 527 pages
AI-generated summary:A writer leaps from a boat at sea to escape his pursuers, leaving his manuscript behind, and the manuscript itself tells what becomes of it as it drifts from reader to reader.
Sawiris 2015 · Winner
Sa'a ramliyya ta'mal bi-al-kahraba'
Title translated by AI:“An Hourglass That Runs on Electricity”
Novel · 215 pages
AI-generated summary:A writer has spent twenty years trying in vain to write a novel; sunk in his solitude, he discovers that turning forty is only a rehearsal for what comes after, and that society has no need of him.
Sawiris 2015 · Winner
Bab al-layl
Title translated by AI:“The Gate of Night”
Waheed al-Taweela · 53 when first published
Novel · 247 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In a café in Tunisia where women sell pleasure to disappointed men, passing affairs open onto the state of Tunisian society and of the Arab world, Palestine included.
Sawiris 2014 · Winner
Bi-hajm habbat 'inab
Title translated by AI:“The Size of a Grape”
Mona El-Shimi · 46 when first published
Novel · 384 pages
AI-generated summary:During Ramadan in the summer of 2012, a mother brings her fifteen-year-old son to a Cairo hospital after a tumor the size of a grape is found in his brain.
Sawiris 2014 · Winner
كتاب الأمان · Kitab al-aman
Novel · 288 pages
AI-generated summary:Khaled Ma'moun, who writes up interrogations, sets out to learn the truth about Mustafa Ismail, a former law professor known as the most skilful thief of the 1990s, from two versions of a book about him.
Sawiris 2013 · Winner
Wa-ra'aytu ruhi baja'a
Title translated by AI:“And I Saw My Soul a Swan”
Novel
Sawiris 2013 · Winner
Bayt al-nar
Title translated by AI:“The House of Fire”
Mahmoud El-Wardani · 61 when first published
Novel · 350 pages
AI-generated summary:In Cairo in the 1960s, a boy raised with his sister by their young widowed mother starts working, and goes from one job to the next as he grows up.
Sawiris 2012 · Winner
Abna' al-Jabalawi
Title translated by AI:“The Sons of Gabalawi”
Ibrahim Farghali · 42 when first published
Novel · 470 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:The books of Naguib Mahfouz have vanished, perhaps for good, and a calligrapher who is writing an old man's life story in a care home wonders where they went, while Mahfouz's characters seem to walk the streets.
Sawiris 2011 · Winner
Fi kull usbu' yawm jum'a
Title translated by AI:“Every Week Has a Friday”
Ibrahim Abdel Meguid · 63 when first published
Novel · 374 pages
AI-generated summary:A woman runs a website that takes in new members only on Fridays; week after week each newcomer tells their story, and the young members slowly form a small community of their own.
Sawiris 2010 · Winner
Malhamat al-Sarasiwa: al-Khuruj
Title translated by AI:“The Sarasiwa Saga: The Exodus”
Ahmed Sabri Abu al-Futuh · 56 when first published
Novel · 492 pages · Malhamat al-Sarasiwa, book 1
AI-generated summary:As Mamluk rule over Egypt nears its end, a family kills a tyrannical Mamluk and must flee its home village, setting out with nowhere to go.
Sawiris 2009 · Winner
Mas'alat waqt
Title translated by AI:“A Matter of Time”
Muntasir al-Qaffash · 44 when first published
Novel · 123 pages · Speculative
AI-generated summary:Yahya, a young man living with his widowed mother in an old flat and selling cheap goods door to door, is visited by Rana, a girl he once tutored in mathematics, after her death.
Sawiris 2008 · Winner
دق الطبول · Daqq al-tubul
Mohamed El-Bisatie · 68 when first published
Novel · 124 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:When the citizens of a small Gulf emirate all fly to France to cheer on their football team, only the foreign workers stay behind, among them an Egyptian to whom a fellow Egyptian woman confides her secret.
Sawiris 2007 · Winner
Qismat al-ghurama'
Title translated by AI:“The Creditors' Share”
Yusuf al-Qa'id · 60 when first published
Novel · 271 pages · Family, Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:Forced to leave Egypt, the Copt Abboud Girgis leaves his wife and only son behind and sends them too little money through an old friend, an actress who has split from her husband, an army officer.
Sawiris 2006 · Winner
قمر على سمرقند · Qamar 'ala Samarqand
Mohamed Mansi Qandil · 58 when first published
Novel · 414 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A young Egyptian doctor named Ali travels to Samarqand in search of an old secret and falls in with Nur Allah, a legendary man who drives his car and seems to steer his fate as well.
Sawiris 2005 · Winner
Ma'tuq al-khayr
Haggag Oddoul · 58 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:In a Nubian community on the Nile at the end of the Ottoman era, the lives of a great many villagers cross, each caught between the clan's settled customs and the urge to break with them.