Arabic fiction in English translation was, for most of the twentieth century, a small and uneven corpus — almost all Mahfouz, almost all from the American University in Cairo Press. That has changed sharply in the last twenty-five years.
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the "Arabic Booker"), founded in 2008 with International Booker Foundation involvement, guarantees an English translation of each year's winner and runner-up. The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation has helped establish a generation of translators — Marilyn Booth, Humphrey Davies, Jonathan Wright, Khaled Mattawa, Maia Tabet, William Hutchins. The Library of Arabic Literature has produced bilingual editions of the classical canon. The Hoopoe imprint at AUC Press has put accessible editions of contemporary Arabic fiction onto English-language bookshop shelves.
For readers building a starter shelf: Mahfouz's Palace Walk; Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North; Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun; Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun; Jokha Alharthi's Celestial Bodies; Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad; Sinan Antoon's The Corpse Washer; Hoda Barakat's Voices of the Lost.
