The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature has announced the shortlist for the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and among the six finalists is Granada: The Complete Trilogy by Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour, translated by Kay Heikkinen and published by Hoopoe, an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press. The work stands as the only book by an African author on this year’s shortlist.
Granada: The Complete Trilogy represents a major achievement in both Arabic literature and translation. First published in Arabic between 1994 and 1995, the trilogy follows the declining fortunes of bookbinder Abu Jaafar’s family in Muslim Spain as the Christian Reconquista closes in after 1492, chronicling how the Muslim community sees its cultural, linguistic, and religious freedoms systematically eroded through confiscations, forced conversions, and expulsions. The judges praised Heikkinen’s handling of this plurilingual epic, noting that “with its size, scope and multiple registers and quotations, [it] represents a difficult task for any translator.” They agreed that “Heikkinen’s translation, bringing us the entire trilogy in English for the first time, earns its own accolades as a stunning rendition of a masterful work of Arabic literature.”
The trilogy’s journey to English readers has been long-awaited. While the first volume was translated by William Granara and published by Syracuse University Press in 2003, the second and third volumes, Maryama and Departure, didn’t follow until November 2024, when Heikkinen’s complete translation finally made this multigenerational epic available in its entirety. The work has been named to the Arab Writers’ Union’s list of the 105 best Arabic novels of the twentieth century, won the Cairo International Book Fair’s 1994 Book of the Year Award, and received the First Prize at the First Arab Woman Book Fair in Cairo in 1995. Patricia Storace of the Times Literary Supplement called the publication of the complete trilogy “a moment of grand culmination,” comparing it to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.
Ashour (1946-2014) was a scholar of profound depth whose academic work on African American literature informed her fiction. She held a PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was the program’s first doctoral candidate to study African American literature, with a dissertation on Black poetics. As a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Ain Shams University in Cairo, she authored more than fifteen works of fiction, memoir, and criticism, receiving the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature and the prestigious Owais Prize for Fiction. Her work consistently centered themes of displacement, cultural erasure, and resistance.
The 2025 shortlist features six works representing diverse Arab voices and translation talents. Alongside Granada, the finalists are The Guardian of Surfaces by Bothayna Al-Essa (Kuwait), translated by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain; Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi (Oman), translated by Marilyn Booth; On the Greenwich Line by Shady Lewis (Egypt), translated by Katharine Halls; The Tale of a Wall: Reflections on Hope and Freedom by Nasser Abu Srour (Palestine), translated by Luke Leafgren; and Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah (Palestine), translated by Barbara Romaine.
In marking its twentieth anniversary, the prize has increased its fund to £4,000, with the winner receiving £3,000 and a newly established runner-up award of £1,000. The winner will be announced on January 7, 2026, at a celebration at the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS.
Granada: The Complete Trilogy is available at AUC Press and major bookstores worldwide.
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