Past Events

Wednesday 23 February 2022, on Zoom

A Bed for the King's Daughter by Shahla Ujayli, translated by Sawad Hussain, shortlisted for the 2021 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize.

Publisher: Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas Press, January 2021, in the Series: CMES Emerging Voices from the Middle East.  ISBN 978-1-4773-2228-4. Pbk. 72 pages. £11.99 / $16.00

What the 2021 panel of judges said about the book:

"Many of the stories contained in Shahla Ujayli’s remarkable collection, A Bed for the King's Daughter, read almost like parables. Composed in a crisp style appropriate to their generic purposes, some of them belong to the category of “short short-stories,” and convey to the reader a sense of surrealism with their frequent instances of insight and poetic beauty. With little or no connection to either time or space and skilfully translated by Sawad Hussain into an English prose that is well suited to the generic purpose of the original text, the stories in this collection will leave the reader impressed with the experimental spirit that the author has brought to this project."

Sawad Hussain is a translator and litterateur. She holds an MA in Modern Arabic Literature from SOAS, London. A contributor to journals such as ArabLit and Asymptote, she was co-editor of the Arabic-English portion of the award-winning Oxford Arabic Dictionary (2014). Her recent translations include Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifa (shortlisted for the 2020 Palestine Book Awards) and Saud Alsanousi's Mama Hissa's Mice. At the Book Club meeting on 7 October 2020, both author Saud Alsanousi and translator Sawad Hussain joined in the discussion on Mama Hissa's Mice). She won the 2019 Arablit Short Story Translation Prize for her translation of "The Sharp Bend at Al-Bakur" by Najwa Bin Shatwan. 

Shahla Ujayli is a Syrian writer, born in 1976. She holds a doctorate in Modern Arabic Literature and Cultural Studies from Aleppo University in Syria and teaches Modern Arabic Literature and Aesthetics at the American University in Madaba, Jordan. She is the author of four novels: The Cat's Eye (2006), which won the Jordan State Award for Literature 2009; Persian Carpet (2012); A Sky Close to Our House (2015) which was IPAF-shortlisted in 2016; and has been published in English, and Summer with the Enemy (2018). She has also published two short story collections: The Latticed Window (2005) and Bed of the King’s Daughter (2016), which won the 2017 Al-Multaqa Prize for the Arabic Short Story awarded by the American University in Kuwait. Her books of literary criticism include: The Syrian Novel: Experimentalism and Theoretical Categories (2009), Cultural Particularity in the Arabic Novel (2011) and Mirror of Strangeness: Articles on Cultural Criticism (2006). Shahla Ujayli has been featured in Banipal magazine on several occasions including the publication of a short story translated by Ayane Ezaki, A Dead Hand, in the Spring 2017 issue. She took part in the IPAF nadwa (writers' workshop) for promising young writers, where she worked on a passage from A Sky Close to Our House.