Algerian novelist Said Khatibi is winner of the 2026 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for Swimming Against the Tide.
Khatibi was awarded the $50,000 prize at an online ceremony on Thursday. The prize comes with additional funding for an English translation.
The announcement was made remotely after Abu Dhabi International Book Fair was postponed from its original dates in April to September 13 to 18 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre.
It marks Khatibi’s second time reaching the final stage of the competition, after Firewood of Sarajevo was shortlisted in 2020. He is also the second Algerian writer to win the prize, after Abdelouahab Aissaoui took the 2020 award for The Spartan Court.
Published by Hachette Antoine / Naufal, Swimming Against the Tide is set in Bousaada in the 1990s. It opens with Aqila Toumi, a respected ophthalmologist, being accused of poisoning her husband, Makhlouf Toumi, a forensic pathologist.
As Aqila is questioned, the novel widens into a historical inquiry and spans half a century of Algerian history, from the Second World War through the war of independence and into the early 1990s.
Tunisian critic Mohamed Elkadhi, chairman of this year’s Ipaf judging panel, praised the book for balancing literary scope with lucid narrative.
“The author succeeded in holding the reader’s breath through a successful balance between the demands of a complex plot and the depth of the psychological analysis of the characters,” he said.
“The novel does not merely present; it moves into critical debate. It does not confine itself to describing the past; it draws the outlines of the future.”
In an accompanying video shown after the announcement, Khatibi discussed the novel’s humanistic aims and his writing process.
“Literature is a path through which we recover our humanity. Literature makes the human being reconcile with himself and with others,” he said.
“It is also a novel about women. The centrality of narration for me, or the centrality of writing, or the centrality of storytelling for me, begins with a woman and ends with a woman.”
Born in 1984 in Bousaada, Khatibi is a novelist and journalist who studied in Algeria and France.
His earlier novel Forty Years Waiting for Isabelle won the Katara Prize in 2017, while The End of the Desert won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the young author category in 2023.
The Ipaf award comes as more of Khatibi’s work reaches English readers. His latest novel in translation, The End of the Sahara, was published by Bitter Lemon Press in February, following Firewood of Sarajevo, translated by Paul Starkey and published by Banipal Books in 2021.
Khatibi emerged from an Ipaf shortlist that also included Doaa Ibrahim’s A Cloud Above My Head, Amin Zaoui’s Siesta Dream, Ahmad Abdulatif’s The Origin of Species, Najwa Barakat’s The Absence of Mai and Diaa Jubaili’s The Seer.
All shortlisted novels were awarded $10,000. Khatibi and the shortlisted authors are expected to appear in sessions at Abu Dhabi International Book Fair in September.
