Six writers from across the Arab literary world are competing for the 2026 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, with the winner set to be announced in December.

The shortlist, released by the American University in Cairo Press, brings together novels by writers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine. Three of the six finalists are Egyptian, while the remaining places go to authors from the other three countries.

The finalists are Abdullah Nasser, whose This Is Not a Bullet comes from Saudi Arabia; Egyptians Ahmad Abdulatif, Ganna Adel and Talal Faisal, shortlisted for The Origin of the Species, Longa-Cairo Nuweibaand An Old Egyptian Madness, respectively; Iraqi novelist Inaam Kachachi, for A Swiss Summer; and Palestinian writer Mohamed Jubaiti, for No Mail to Gaza.

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They emerged from 143 novels submitted from 23 countries, following deliberations by a five-member judging panel chaired by Hoda Elsadda, professor of English and comparative literature at Cairo University.

The panel includes novelist May Telmissany, Sudanese writer and former Mahfouz Medal recipient Hammour Ziada, journalist Sayed Mahmoud and British literary translator Raphael Cohen.

What distinguishes the Mahfouz Medal is what happens after the judging. The prize is aimed at Arabic-language fiction that has yet to find an English-language audience. Its winner receives $5,000, but more importantly, the winning novel is translated and published in English by Hoopoe, the fiction imprint of AUC Press.

That makes the medal an important gateway between Arabic literary culture and international readers. Rather than rewarding a work that has already established itself abroad, it can effectively determine which new Arabic novel receives that first major push into the English-language market.

This year’s finalists also reflect a range of literary concerns. In Nasser’s This Is Not a Bullet, a return to childhood leads into an old legal case involving the narrator’s father. Kachachi’s A Swiss Summer and Jubaiti’s No Mail to Gaza bring Iraqi and Palestinian perspectives to the competition, while the Egyptian finalists extend the country’s long association with the prize.

The medal was established in 1996 in honor of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate whose fiction played a defining role in the development of modern Arabic literature.

The 2026 winner will be announced on 11 December Mahfouz’s birthday. Previous recipients include Fatma Qandil, Ahmed Taibaoui, Omaima Al-Khamis, Huzama Habayeb and Adel Esmat.