The Judges

in the twentieth year of the prize

  Tina Phillips

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.

Professor Tina Phillips is chair of judges.

   

   Susan F Frenk

Dr Susan F Frenk is Principal of St Aidan's College, Durham University, Chair of Durham City of Sanctuary, and co-Director of the Societal Innovation and Enterprise Forum (SIEF). She also sits on the steering committees of the Durham University Centre for Jewish Studies and Durham Pride. She is a sponsor of Durham University's Palestine Educational Trust. Following degrees from Cambridge University, she lectured in Latin American Studies at Durham University, but her main research interests are now Migration Studies and creating community inclusion. For ten years, St Aidan's College hosted the annual Banipal Visiting Writer Fellowship for a published author writing in Arabic, initiated by the College's Writing Fellow, Fadia Faqir, in collaboration with Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature and the British Council. 

  Nashwa Nasreldin

Nashwa Nasreldin is a writer, editor, and literary translator of Arabic novels, short stories, poems, screenplays and non-fiction. Her translations have been published in The Common, Words Without Borders and ArabLit Quarterly, among other publications. Her translation of Abdelrashid Mahmoudi’s After Coffee was a ‘Fiction Finalist’ at the 2019 International Book Awards. Her other translations include Taleb Alrefai’s Shadow of the Sun, and with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria by Samar Yazbek. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, USA, and her poems and essays have appeared in literary journals in the UK and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at ArabLit.org and ArabLit Quarterly and is the commissioning editor at the Poetry Translation Centre.

  Boyd Tonkin

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. 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 was formerly Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent. He revived and judged the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 2001-2015, chaired the Man Booker International Prize 2016, then became the prize’s Special Adviser. He has served as a member of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and as a Trustee of the Orwell Foundation. His reader’s guide to global fiction, The 100 Best Novels in Translation, is published by Galileo.