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The 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, the 20th year
Announcing MARILYN BOOTH the 2025 winner
for her translation of Honey Hunger
by Zahran Alqasmi
“Beautiful evocative prose!
A masterclass in poetic translation!
A stunning rendition of a masterful work of Arabic literature!”
THE WINNER
The 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation is awarded to Marilyn Booth for her translation of Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi, published in 2025 by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press. Following the shortlist of six works that was announced on 1 December 2025, the judges have named Marilyn Booth as the winner of the 2025 prize, to be awarded by the Society of Authors on 10 February 2026.
THE RUNNER-UP
From the 2025 prize, a runner-up to the winner is chosen by the judging panel from the shortlist, with an award of £1,000 generously supported by the Ghobash family. Kay Heikkinen’s translation of Radwa Ashour’s trilogy, Granada: The Complete Trilogy, published by Hoopoe Fiction, an imprint of the AUC press, in 2024, is named as the runner-up.
The judging panel of four comprised Professor Tina Phillips (Chair), scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature; Dr Susan F. Frenk, Principal of St Aidan’s College, Durham University; Nashwa Nasreldin, writer, editor and literary translator; and Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL, journalist, writer and former Literary Editor at The Independent. For more information about the judges click here.
THE JUDGES’ REPORT
Of the six shortlisted works, the two front runners were Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger, translated by Marilyn Booth, and Radwa Ashour’s Granada: The Complete Trilogy, translated by Kay Heikkinen. These two novels are very different in nature and weighing up the judging criteria against them was tricky (but fun!). Honey Hunger is a poetic eco-novel from the Gulf while Granada: The Complete Trilogy is an extended historical saga set in the Reconquista period in Muslim Spain. As such the two posed different tests for their translators, with the challenge of Honey Hunger lying in recreating the lyricism of the original and bringing the remote landscapes of Oman home to the Anglophone reader, and the challenge for Granada: The Complete Trilogy lying more in the vastness of the project and multitude of languages, voices and registers in the text.
Marilyn Booth and Kay Heikkinen, both highly experienced translators, rose to the occasion and the resulting works are fine examples of standalone fiction. Furthermore, they are testimony not only to the skill of the translators and artistry of the original texts, but to modern Arabic literary translation as a field, which has developed from a side-show to academic scholarship on modern Arabic literature into a mature field of artistic production, aided in no small part by the work of Banipal and the support and recognition of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize over the last twenty years.
In the end, the judges selected Honey Hunger as the winner due to its exquisite language and style in translation and on account of the significance of the themes explored in the novel (love, addiction, environment), and the fresh perspective the Omani voice and setting brings to bear on them.
Nashwa Nasreldin commented that: Honey Hunger translated by Marilyn Booth ‘is more than a story; it’s a quiet, evocative song, a lyric lament – and celebration – a product of the deeply attentive approach by both author and translator to their work.’
Boyd Tonkin stated that: ‘Lyrical and poetic, translated with a flare and care to match its precise art, Honey Hunger brings remote places, and almost-hidden lives, intimately close.’
Susan Frenk wrote: ‘Intensely poetic, yet profoundly rooted, Honey Hunger reveals the layers of contemporary Oman through voices that are too often unheard.’
Tina Phillips added: ‘Marilyn Booth’s translation is a masterclass in poetic translation which remains remarkably true to the original and seamlessly transports the reader to distant mountain landscapes of Oman’.
ABOUT THE WINNING TRANSLATOR
Marilyn Booth is an acclaimed US translator of Arabic literature into English. She translated Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies, which was the first Arab novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2019, also Alharthi’s Bitter Orange Tree and Silken Gazelles; Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, and Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, Disciples of Passion and The Tiller of Waters. Her other translations include Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping, Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea, Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s Thieves in Retirement, Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones, Ibtihal Salem’s Children of the Waters, Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcissus: A Modern Arabic Novel, Nawal El Saadawi’s The Circling Song and Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door.
She is professor emerita at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University, and has also taught at Brown University, American University of Cairo and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE WINNING WORK
Zahran Alqasmi is a poet and novelist, born in the Sultanate of Oman in 1974. He is also a medical doctor, with a specialisation in infectious diseases, and keeps bees. Honey Hunger is his third of four published novels and his first in English translation. In 2023 he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel The Water Diviner. He has also published ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.
ABOUT THE WINNING WORK
Honey Hunger
by Zahran Alqasmi
Published by Hoopoe Fiction, an imprint of AUC Press,
4 February 2025
Pbk ISBN: 9781649033901. £14.99, $18.95
E-ISBN: 9781549033925. £13.31, $17.99
See https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/SaifGhobashBanipalPrize
Zahran Alqasmi’s Honey Hunger takes us to the remote highland landscapes of Oman and the story of Azzan, a beekeeper who retreats into the mountains to rebuild his life and hives. As Azzan becomes immersed in nature and beekeeping, he forms bonds with fellow honey hunters and a lyrical story of loss, addiction, resilience, healing and the fragile balance of human and nature unfolds. This novel is exceptional not only for its beautiful evocative prose but for its exploration of the taboo topic of addiction in rural Oman and for its vital ecological theme.
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THE RUNNER-UP to the winner
From the 2025 prize, a runner-up to the winner is also selected by the judging panel
Kay Heikkinen for her translation of
Granada: The Complete Trilogy by Radwa Ashour
JUDGES’ COMMENTS ON THE RUNNER-UP
Nashwa Nasreldin commented: ‘This translation, bringing us the entire trilogy into English for the first time, earns its own accolades as a stunning rendition of a masterful work of Arabic literature.’
Tina Phillips noted: ‘The long-awaited full translation of Radwa Ashour’s trilogy does not disappoint. An immense task, Heikkinen does a magnificent job of recreating the multitude of voices, registers and quotations in Granada.’
Susan Frenk said: ‘A magnificent tapestry, a throng of voices, bringing to life the violent dismantling of Al Andalus.’
Boyd Tonkin added: ‘Artfully designed, and powerfully translated, the family saga in the heart of Ashour’s trilogy grips and moves.’
ABOUT THE RUNNER-UP TRANSLATOR
Kay Heikkinen is a translator and academic who has translated two novels by the Palestinian author Huzama Habayeb – Velvet (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), for which she was awarded the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, and Before the Queen Falls Asleep (MacLehose Press) which was shortlisted for the 2024 prize. She has translated Naguib Mahfouz’s In the Time of Love (AUC Press, 2010) and Radwa Ashour’s The Woman from Tantoura (AUC Press, 2019). She holds a PhD from Harvard University, and was previously Ibn Rushd Lecturer of Arabic at the University of Chicago.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE RUNNER-UP BOOK
Radwa Ashour (1946–2014) is a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer and scholar. She is the author of more than fifteen works of fiction, memoirs and criticism, including Siraaj (translated by Barbara Romaine, Univ Texas Press, 2007), Granada (translated by William Granara, AUC Press, 2008), Blue Lorries (translated by Barbara Romaine, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2014), and The Woman from Tantoura (translated by Kay Keikkinen, AUC Press, 2014) and was a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature and the prestigious Owais Prize for Fiction.
ABOUT THE RUNNER-UP BOOK
Granada: The Complete Trilogy
by Radwa Ashour
Published by Hoopoe Fiction, an imprint of AUC Press, 5 November, 2024
Pbk ISBN: 9781649033765. £14.99, $19.95
E-ISBN 9781649033789. £8.99, $18.99
See https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/SaifGhobashBanipalPrize
When the first part of this trilogy was published in Arabic in 1994, it won the Book of the Year prize at the Cairo International Book Fair. The following year, the entire trilogy won first prize for the best book by an Arab woman writer.
It chronicles the destruction of Moorish Spain following the conquest of Granada by Spain’s catholic monarchs in 1492, and tells the story of the Muslims who remained in Andalusia, who struggled to maintain faith and hope in a possible future. It narrates a community’s effort to comprehend what has happened to them, and of their valiant but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to resist the destruction of their identity.
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THE AWARD CEREMONY – 10 February 2026
The Translation Prizes Award Ceremony, hosted by the Society of Authors, the administrator of the prize, will take place on 10 February 2026, 18.15–20.45 GMT at the British Library and online. See this link for more or click on the image https://societyofauthors.org/event/the-2025-society-of-authors-translation-prizes/.
The following prizes will be awarded: the first John Calder Translation Prize (any language), the TA First Translation Prize (debut translation from any language), the Premio Valle Inclán (Spanish), the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize (Arabic), the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize (Japanese), the Scott Moncrieff Prize (French), The Goethe-Institut Award for New Translation (German), the Schlegel-Tieck Prize (German), and the Bernard Shaw Prize (Swedish).
Click for link to the Shortlists: https://societyofauthors.org/2025/12/01/announcing-the-translation-prizes-2025-shortlists/
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A CELEBRATION OF ARABIC LITERARY TRANSLATION – 13 February 2026
The Annual Lecture and the Winner of the 2025 Prize
On Friday 13 February 2026, from 18:00 GMT, at the SOAS Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature will co-host with SOAS University of London A Celebration of Arabic Literary Translation at which the winning translator Marilyn Booth will be in conversation with the chair of the judging panel Professor Tina Phillips. Boyd Tonkin, former Literary Editor at The Independent and re-founder of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, will give the Annual Prize Lecture on the subject: Republic of letters or global bazaar: literary translation in the new millennium. The event will be in-person and online, followed by a Q&A and a reception.
Published Date - 07/01/2026
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