A CELEBRATION OF
ARABIC LITERARY TRANSLATION
13 February 2026

Hosted by SOAS, University of London, and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature

 

THE LECTURE

Boyd Tonkin gives the Annual Prize Lecture on:

Republic of letters or global bazaar:
literary translation in the new millennium

The Banipal Trust is delighted to announce that Boyd Tonkin, renowned for his passionate interest in and encouragement of the translation of literature, will give the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize Lecture.  He was responsible for re-founding the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2001, which honoured both the translator and the author equally, and seeing it continue successfully until 2015, when it merged with the then-named Man Booker International Prize. The impetus to literary translation given by the IFFP at the start of the 21st century  opened up a new era in support for contemporary literature from around the world in translation. By coincidence the lecture he will give on 13 February will mark 25 years since that re-founding began.

His lecture will indeed look back at this past quarter-century, and describe how it has been, on some measures, a boom time for literary translation in the Anglosphere. High-profile prizes, innovative imprints, regular bestsellers, and a new prominence in online media, have strengthened a publishing sector for translated literature often treated as marginal and eccentric. For a certain kind of Anglophone reader, an interest in translated fiction has become a badge of fashion and a token of taste. Many writers, and their translators, have derived benefit from this new wave of attention. Yet the wider climate has grown harsher as book publishing has to compete with powerful digital distractions. 

The lecture will also look more widely at how marketing by globalised corporations promotes a few trends and genres within translated literature, at the expense of others. Writing from outside the dominant European languages still struggles to find a place alongside work from French, Spanish or German, unless it belongs in a familiar niche. Literary translators, who have slowly secured greater respect and reward, now find that AI threatens to undermine their terms of trade. And aggressive nativist politics and ideologies seek to deter the sympathetic curiosity about other ways of life and thought on which translation always depends. The past 25 years have seen limited gains for the idea of an international republic of letters. But, over the next quarter-century, the arts of making, publishing and reading translation will have to find new ways to survive and flourish in a chaotic global bazaar. 

 

THE WINNER

Marilyn Booth, who has won the 20th year's prize for her translation of Honey Hunger by the Omani author Zahran Alqasmi. 

She will be in conversation with Chair of Judges Prof. Tina Phillips, along with readings from Honey Hunger in both Arabic and English. 

A Q&A of all speakers with the audience will be moderated by SOAS Prof. Wen-chin Ouyang.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL is a journalist, editor and writer who was awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature over the course of a career, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Society. He currently writes on books and arts for international media including The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, The Spectator and Times Literary Supplement, and between 1996 and 2016 was Literary Editor and then Senior Writer at The Independent newspaper. He revived and judged the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize from 2001 until it merged with the Man Booker International Prize in 2015, chaired the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and then became the prize’s Special Adviser.

He was a judge on the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, the 20th year of the prize, and has judged a number of other prizes, including the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize, the Whitbread biography award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the David Cohen Prize and the Prix Cévennes. He has served as a member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and as a Trustee of the Orwell Foundation.

Following the success of Robert McCrum's 100 Best Novels in English, its publisher Galileo, invited Boyd Tonkin to create a volume based on great works written in other languages than English. And in 2018, Galileo published The 100 Best Novels in Translation – Boyd Tonkin's guide to global fiction that is, as the publisher says, "a rich tapestry of the best fiction from around the world".

 Marilyn Booth is the winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize in the 20th year of the prize for her translation of Honey Hunger by Omani author Zahran Alqasmi. She is an acclaimed US translator of Arabic literature into English. Her translations include Celestial Bodies by the Omani author Jokha Alharthi, which was the first Arab novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2019, as well as Alharthi’s novels Bitter Orange Tree and Silken Gazelles, Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song and No Road to Paradise, and Hoda Barakat’s Voices of the Lost, Disciples of Passion and The Tiller of Waters.

Other translations include Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping,  Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea, Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s Thieves in Retirement, Alia Mamdouh’s The Loved Ones, Ibtihal Salem’s Children of the Waters, Somaya Ramadan’s Leaves of Narcissus: A Modern Arabic Novel, Nawal El Saadawi’s The Circling Song and Memoirs from the Women’s Prison and Latifa al-Zayyat’s The Open Door.

Marilyn Booth is professor emerita at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University, and has also taught at Brown University, American University of Cairo and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women’s writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.

Professor Tina Phillips is a scholar and translator of modern Arabic literature and holds The His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Chair of Modern Arabic Studies at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge. She has studied at the University of Oxford and SOAS and from 2011-2025 worked at the University of Exeter, serving as Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies from 2022-25.

Her research focuses on modern Arabic literature, religion and environment and her publications include Religion in the Egyptian Novel: Themes and Approaches (2019) and novels by Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammed Berrada and Samuel Shimon.

The event will be in-person and online

All welcome to this free event

Links to register for either in-person or online attendance will be available shortly