Katharine Halls wins the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for her translation of Rotten Evidence by Egyptian author Ahmed Naji. The award honors the best Arabic-to-English literary translation and will be presented by the Society of Authors on February 12, 2025.

Halls’ translation stood out from a shortlist of six. Judges loved it, described it as a “a brilliant feat” and “a masterclass.”  Rotten Evidence is Ahmed Naji memoir about life in prison after his novel Using Life led to his arrest. Halls’ translation kept the sharp humor and cultural richness of the original Arabic intact. Judge Laura Watkinson said how she “weaves elements of Arabic into the text in a way that allows non-Arabic speakers to appreciate puns and prison slang. The style is fluent, colloquial, and entertaining.”

Halls, an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales, has been making waves in the literary translation world. Her work on Rotten Evidence was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography. She’s been awarded the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and the Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, with translations featured in Frieze, The Believer, and Words Without Borders.

Reflecting on the win, Halls kept things grounded:
“It is a wonderful honour to have been awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for my translation of Ahmed Naji’s Rotten Evidence, though a strange and difficult time to imagine celebrating anything. Writing about and against prison will always be a revolutionary act, and Ahmed Naji is a particularly brave, witty, and uncompromising writer.”

The award will be officially presented at the Society of Authors’ Translation Prizes Ceremony at the British Library on February 12, 2025. Halls will also take part in a public conversation at SOAS University of London on February 13, 2025, as part of an event celebrating Arabic literary translation.

A huge congratulations to Katharine Halls – well-deserved! Visit her website to learn more about her work.