All prizes Egypt
جائزة ساويرس الثقافية
Egypt · Since 2005 · For books in Arabic
Awarded each January in Cairo by the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development to Egyptian writers; this site follows its best novel award for established writers, usually given to one book or shared between two, with a public shortlist only in 2020.
The Sawiris Foundation for Social Development launched the award in 2005 for Egyptian writers of novels and short story collections. Each of these categories has two branches: one for established writers and one for writers up to forty, whose prizes have a first and a second place. Awards for screenplays, plays, literary criticism and children's books were added over the years. Entries must be first editions published in the three years before, by Egyptian authors. Independent juries of writers, critics and academics choose the winners, who are announced at a ceremony in Cairo each January; the prizes carry the year of the competition, so those for 2024 were presented in January 2025. A jury may share an award between two books or withhold it.
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.