Egyptian Novelist Shady Lewis Wins James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shady Lewis has won one of Britain's oldest literary prizes for a novel translated from Arabic, in what judges called a rare and unanimous decision.
Egyptian novelist and journalist Shady Lewis has won the fiction category of the James Tait Black Prize for On the Greenwich Line, making it only the third translated work in the award's more than century-long history to take the prize.
Run by the University of Edinburgh and first established in 1919, the James Tait Black Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards, with this year's winners selected from a record pool of more than 500 submissions and five titles shortlisted in each category.
Published by Peirene Press and translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls, On the Greenwich Line follows an Egyptian-born housing officer navigating the lives of migrants and refugees in East London.
The novel has drawn attention for its dark humour and its portrayal of bureaucracy and displacement, with judges noting its sensitive yet subversive treatment of immigrant life in London and what they described as the banal cruelty of the British state's approach to asylum seekers under austerity.
The panel pointed to the book's shifting narrative voice and its ability to move between the poignant and the comic as particular strengths, calling it a rare book and praising Halls's translation as a capable and accomplished rendering of Lewis's tone. Lewis, who is based in London, is one of the few Arab authors to have won a major British literary award for work translated from Arabic.
