Marilyn Booth wins the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation
- Jury report
- About the winning translator
- About the author of the winning work
- About the winning work
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 announcement of the shortlist of six works on 1 December 2025, the jury has named Marilyn Booth as the winner of the 2025 prize, which will be presented by the Society of Authors on 10 February 2026.
Starting with the 2025 award, the jury selects a runner-up, who receives a £1,000 prize generously sponsored by the Ghobash family. Kay Heikkinen's translation of Radwa Ashour's trilogy, Granada: The Complete Trilogy, published by Hoopoe Fiction, an imprint of AUC Press, in 2024, was named the finalist.
The four-member jury consisted of 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 of The Independent.
Jury report
Of the six shortlisted works, the two favourites were Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi, translated by Marilyn Booth, and Granada: The Complete Trilogy by Radwa Ashour, translated by Kay Heikkinen. These two novels are very different in nature and weighing up the assessment criteria between them was complicated (but fun!). Honey Hunger is a poetic ecological novel set in the Gulf, while Granada: The Complete Trilogy is an extensive historical saga set in the period of the Reconquista in Muslim Spain. As such, both posed different challenges for their translators: the challenge for Honey Hunger was to recreate the lyricism of the original and bring the remote landscapes of Oman closer to the English-speaking reader, while the challenge for Granada: The Complete Trilogy lay more in the scale of the project and the 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 excellent examples of independent fiction. Moreover, they are a testament not only to the skill of the translators and the artistry of the original texts, but also to modern Arabic literary translation as a field, which has grown from a sideshow to academic scholarship on modern Arabic literature to become a mature field of artistic production, with the help in large part of Banipal's work and the support and recognition of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize over the last twenty years.
In the end, the jury selected Honey Hunger as the winner for its exquisite language and style in translation, for the importance of the themes explored in the novel (love, addiction, the environment) and for the new perspective that the Omani voice and setting bring to them.
Nashwa Nasreldin commented that Honey Hunger, translated by Marilyn Booth, ‘is more than a story; it is a quiet and evocative song, a lyrical lament—and a celebration—born of the deeply attentive approach of the author and translator to their work.’
Boyd Tonkin said: ‘Lyrical and poetic, translated with a style and care that matches its precise artistry, Honey Hunger brings remote places and almost hidden lives intimately close.’
Susan Frenk wrote: ‘Intensely poetic, yet deeply grounded, Honey Hunger reveals the layers of contemporary Oman through voices that are often unheard.’
Tina Phillips added: ‘Marilyn Booth's translation is a masterpiece of poetic translation that remains remarkably faithful to the original and transports the reader to the distant mountainous landscapes of Oman.’
About the winning translator
Marilyn Booth is an acclaimed American translator of Arabic literature into English. She translated Jokha Alharthi's ‘Celestial Bodies,’ the first Arabic novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2019, as well as Alharthi's ‘Bitter Orange Tree’ and ‘Silken Gazelles’; The Penguin's Song and No Road to Paradise by Hassan Daoud, and Voices of the Lost, Disciples of Passion and The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat. His other translations include ‘As Though She Were Sleeping’ by Elias Khoury; ‘Girls of Riyadh’ by Rajaa Alsanea; ‘Thieves in Retirement’ by Hamdi Abu Golayyel; ‘The Loved Ones’ by Alia Mamdouh; Children of the Waters by Ibtihal Salem; Leaves of Narcissus: A Modern Arabic Novel by Somaya Ramadan; The Circling Song and Memoirs from the Women's Prison by Nawal El Saadawi; and The Open Door by Latifa al-Zayyat.
She is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, University of Oxford, and has also taught at Brown University, the American University in Cairo, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research publications focus on the literature of Arabic-speaking women and the ideology of gender debates in the 19th century, the most recent being The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thought 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 doctor, specialising in infectious diseases, and is involved in beekeeping. Honey Hunger is the third of his four published novels and the first to be translated into English. In 2023, he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his novel The Water Diviner. He has also published ten collections of poetry and a collection of short stories.
About the winning work
Zahran Alqasmi's Honey Hunger transports you to the remote mountainous landscapes of Oman and tells the story of Azzan, a beekeeper who retreats to the mountains to rebuild his life and his beehives. As Azzan immerses himself in nature and beekeeping, he forms bonds with other honey hunters and a lyrical story unfolds about loss, addiction, resilience, healing and the fragile balance between humans and nature. This novel is exceptional not only for its beautiful and evocative prose, but also for its exploration of the taboo subject of addiction in rural Oman and its vital ecological theme.