Winner of 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize recognised for Egyptian prison memoir translation

Katharine Halls describes award for English version of Ahmed Naji's book, Rotten Evidence, as a 'wonderful honour'

Katharine Halls has won the the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for her work on Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji's memoir Rotten Evidence. Photo: Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize

An Arabic-to-English translator from Wales has won the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

The annual £3,000 ($3,800) award was given to Katharine Halls for her translation of a memoir by Egyptian journalist and writer Ahmed Naji, titled Rotten Evidence and published by McSweeney’s.

Halls described winning the prize as a “wonderful honour”, but said it was “a strange and difficult time to imagine celebrating anything”.

She explained: “This past month has brought us joy and relief at the sight of former detainees walking free from prisons across Syria, where they have spent years in conditions of indescribable cruelty which so many others did not survive.

Egyptian writer Ahmed Naji's prison novel, Rotten Evidence, was translated by Katharine Halls. Photo: Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize

In her statement, Halls also mentioned Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who Naji dedicated a chapter in the book to. El-Fattah was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison in 2019 for allegedly spreading false news online and has yet to be released despite the completion of his sentence.

“It is impossible to forget, in these times of resurgent fascism, that writing about and against prison will always be a revolutionary act,” Halls added. “Ahmed Naji is a particularly brave, witty, and uncompromising writer, and I hope this accolade will encourage many more readers to pick up his excellent, indeed revolutionary, book.”

One of the judges, editor for the Times Literary Supplement Michael Caines, praised the work, calling it “scathing, humorous, compelling”. Another judge, literary translator Nariman Youssef, said Halls' work helped showcase the nuances of Naji’s voice.

“Halls seamlessly navigates culturally specific idioms and prison slang,” Youssef said. “Her bold choice to offer transliterations or literal translations of terms or phrases that might seem, at first glance, untranslatable – 'truth is a mango’, ‘shambara’ – is justified time and again by the deft elucidations that she weaves into the text with inimitable simplicity.”

Naji, the author of Rotten Evidence, is a writer, journalist and documentary filmmaker. In 2016, he was arrested and served almost 300 days in prison for “violating public modesty” with the content of his novel The Use of Life. After being released and moving to the US in 2019, Naji wrote about his experience during that time, charting the journey through the courts and prison systems in contrast to his childhood experiences as the son of a leading figure in the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji, translated by Katharine Halls, details Naji's time in Egypt's prison system. Photo: Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize

Halls has previously been honoured for her translations. In 2021, she was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Egyptian writer Haytham El-Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. She also won the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation along with Adam Talib on Saudi novelist Raja'a Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace.

Her translation of Naji’s prison memoir was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography in the US. This year's shortlist included three novels, a graphic memoir and a biographical detective story.