The American University in Cairo Press has announced the shortlist for the 2026 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, naming six novels that have not yet been translated into English. The shortlist was announced on 31 August, according to ArabLit, and reported by Brittle Paper on 2 September. The winner is due to be announced on 11 December, the birthday of Mahfouz himself.
The authors come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine. The prize is unusual among literary awards because its reward goes beyond the cheque: the winning novel is translated into English and published by AUC Press under its Hoopoe fiction imprint. For readers who want to know which Arab novelists the wider world will read next, the list is a useful place to start.
The six novels
The six were chosen from 143 novels submitted from 23 countries. ArabLit gives the titles in English, with their Arabic publishers. These are working English titles, since none of the books has yet been translated.
- Abdullah Nasser (Saudi Arabia), This Is Not a Bullet, published by Al Karma Publishers.
- Ahmad Abdulatif (Egypt), The Origin of the Species, published by Hayat Publishing.
- Ganna Adel (Egypt), Longa-Cairo Nuweiba, published by Waziz Books.
- Inaam Kachachi (Iraq), A Swiss Summer, published by Al Dar Al Masriah Al Lubnaniah.
- Mohamed Jubaiti (Palestine), No Mail to Gaza, published by Dar Al Adab.
- Talal Faisal (Egypt), An Old Egyptian Madness, published by Diwan Publishing.
Brittle Paper describes Nasser’s novel as one in which the narrator returns to a childhood memory and an old court case involving his father. The sources read do not summarise the other five, so readers will need the publishers’ own descriptions to learn more.
Two titles arrive with recent credentials. ArabLit notes that A Swiss Summer was on the 2026 Sheikh Zayed Book Award longlist, and that The Origin of the Species was on the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction shortlist. Two of the year’s other Arabic book prizes had already noticed them.
Who decides
The judges are Hoda Elsadda, who chairs the panel and is a professor at Cairo University; the novelist May Telmissany; the Sudanese novelist and former medal winner Hammour Ziada; the journalist Sayed Mahmoud; and the translator Raphael Cohen.
A scholar, two novelists, a journalist and a translator bring different ways of reading. Having a translator on the panel is a practical choice for a prize whose final stage is translation.
What the medal offers
The medal has been awarded annually by AUC Press since 1996. It carries a prize of $5,000, and the winning novel is translated and published by AUC Press. That second part is why the prize is watched so closely. Translation into English remains one of the surest routes for an Arabic novel to reach international readers, reviewers and foreign publishers.
The name carries weight too. Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the only Arab writer to have done so. According to Brittle Paper, AUC Press has published or licensed about 600 foreign-language editions of his work in 40 languages, so the press is closely tied to his legacy.
Past medal winners named in the announcement include Fatma Qandil, Ahmed Taibaoui, Omaima Al-Khamis, Huzama Habayeb and Adel Esmat. Al-Khamis is Saudi, and Gulf readers will see in her name an earlier sign of the Kingdom’s fiction reaching the prize.
Why Gulf readers should look
The Saudi presence on the list, in Nasser’s novel, is the clearest regional hook. A place on this shortlist puts a Saudi novel beside Egyptian and Iraqi voices. The Iraqi novelist Kachachi and the Egyptian trio of Abdulatif, Adel and Faisal give the list its breadth.
For readers who do not wait for translation, the shortlist also works as a reading list in Arabic. Each of the six has an Arabic publisher named, which makes the books easy to find in the original at bookshops and book fairs across the region.
What comes next
The six authors now wait for 11 December, when the winner will be named on the birthday of the writer whose name the medal carries. The announcement does not describe the ceremony or name a venue. If the history of the prize is a guide, the result will bring one of these writers a first English edition, and with it a readership that is much larger than the one that reads the book in Arabic today.
Until then, the shortlist is an invitation to read ahead of the translators, and to follow the six publishers named above, whose own pages are the best guide to each book.
Sources: ArabLit, Brittle Paper