Mohammed Abdelnabi

Mohammed Abdelnabi is an Egyptian writer born in Dakahlia Governorate in 1977. He obtained a BA in languages and translation from the English and Simultaneous Translation Department of Al-Azhar University in 2002 and currently works as a freelance translator. He has published several novels and short story collections, including After the Prince Went to Hunt (Merit, 2008), The Return of the Sheikh (Rowafid, 2011), In the Spider’s Room (Hoopoe, 2018), Once Upon a Time (Al-Ain, 2018), and Almost Every Day (Al-Mahrousa, 2023). In addition to his work, Abdelnabi runs a creative writing workshop in Egypt that has resulted in two books about his experience: In the Writing Room (Al-Karama, 2021) and The Story and What Is In It (Al-Karama, 2023). His novel The Return of the Sheikh was longlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction and his story collection, As the Flood Passes the Sleeping Village won the best short story collection at the 2015 Cairo Book Fair. In 2010, his short story collection The Ghost of Anton Chekhov won the Sawiris Literature Prize. He has translated many novels and nonfiction books from English to Arabic, including In the Country of Men, by Hisham Matar (Cairo: Dar el-Shorouk, 2016) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (Cairo: Al-Karama, 2016).

Nada Faris is a writer and literary translator from Kuwait. She is the author of Fountain of Youth (Athens, Greece: Vine Leaves Press, 2016), a semi-finalist in the 2016 Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award, and Mischief Diary (Doha, Qatar: HBKU, 2018), a young adult short story collection. She collaborated with Maha Al-Asaker on Women of Kuwait (Hillsboro, North Carolina: Daylight Books 2019), which became a finalist in the Lucie Photobook Award. And recently, Nada translated Bothayna Al-Essa’s Arabic novel Lost in Mecca, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and named a “Notable Translation” by World Literature Today.