Celebrating 20 years of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
6:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, University of London
- Room
- Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Join us for a keynote lecture by Boyd Tonkin, reflecting on the past quarter‑century of literary translation in a talk titled Republic of letters or global bazaar: literary translation in the new millennium.
Following the lecture, the 20th Saif Ghobash Banipal prize winner Marilyn Booth will discuss her acclaimed translation of Honey Hunger.
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.
His lecture will 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.
Following the lecture, the 20th Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize winner, Marilyn Booth, will discuss her acclaimed translation of Honey Hunger by Omani author Zahran Alqasmi with Chair of Judges Professor Tina Phillips. The session will include bilingual readings from the novel, followed by a Q&A with all speakers, moderated by SOAS Professor Wen‑chin Ouyang.
About the speakers
Boyd Tonkin Hon. FRSL is a journalist, editor, and writer awarded the Royal Society of Literature’s Benson Medal in 2020 for outstanding service to literature, and elected an Honorary Fellow. He writes on books and the arts for international publications including the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, The Spectator, and Times Literary Supplement. Literary Editor and Senior Writer at The Independent (1996 to 2016), he revived the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, chaired the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, and later served as Special Adviser. In 2018, he published The 100 Best Novels in Translation.
Marilyn Booth won the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for her translation of Honey Hunger by Zahran Alqasmi. An acclaimed translator of Arabic literature, her works include Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi – the first Arab novel to win the International Booker Prize (2019) – along with novels by Hassan Daoud, Hoda Barakat, Elias Khoury, and others. Professor Emerita at Oxford, she has also taught at Brown, AUC, and Illinois. Her scholarship focuses on Arab women’s writing and gender debates, most recently in The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz.
Tina Phillips is Professor of Modern Arabic Studies and holds the His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Chair at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Educated at Oxford and SOAS, she worked at the University of Exeter (2011 to 2025), serving as Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (2022 to 25). Her research explores modern Arabic literature, religion, and the environment. Publications include Religion in the Egyptian Novel: Themes and Approaches (2019) and studies on novelists including Naguib Mahfouz, Mohammed Berrada, and Samuel Shimon.
Image credit: Tatiana Mokhova via unsplash
