Said Khatibi wins International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2026

Two parallel stories in Algiers
The novel follows two parallel storylines set in the Algerian capital. A renowned ophthalmologist restores sight to her patients using corneas taken from bodies in the hospital mortuary—her husband's workplace— only to find herself accused of his murder. Across the city, her father, a former fighter in the Algerian resistance, faces charges of treason.
As the two stories weave together, the novel traces Algeria's modern history from the Second World War through to the dark decade of the 1990s – the period commonly known as the Algerian Civil War – taking in the war of independence and its long aftermath along the way.
In a film produced by IPAF, Khatibi spoke about the more profound meaning behind his protagonist Aqila's work as an eye doctor: "What Aqila does in this novel is not only about saving patients from blindness — it is also her attempt to save a society so that it can see things as they truly are." Starting with a criminal investigation serves as a threshold for understanding the greater societal crimes that have occurred over the past decades.

A journey against the current of history
Mohamed Elkadhi described Swimming Against the Tide as a gripping journey that moves against the current of history, slipping with ease into the rumblings of what happened in Algeria in the lead-up to the dark decade. He said Khatibi offers the reader torn fragments of a complex and clouded picture that need to be pieced back together to arrive at a meaning that captures an elusive historical moment. He praised the novel's delicate sensibility, where the personal and the collective sit side by side; a language that shifts between the everyday and the literary; and characters in whom hardship and fragility meet. "It is a novel that draws you in hungrily," he said, "but leaves a bitter impression of a world we think we know, only to discover it is weighed down by murky impulses, silent sorrows, and squandered longings."

Probing the depths of modern Algerian history
Professor Yasir Suleiman, Chair of the IPAF Board of Trustees, described Swimming Against the Tide as a deceptive crime story that Khatibi uses to dig deep into modern Algerian history, covering the war of independence from 1956 to 1962 and the decades that followed, right up to the early years of what is traditionally known as the Black Decade in the early 1990s. He noted that Khatibi does this work through two interwoven, cross-generational narratives — the daughter's and the father's — and that the novel's complex movement back and forth in time lays bare the tensions and conflicts Algerians lived through during that period. It is as though the book is saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same: patterns of behaviour repeat across generations, the same social ills resurface relentlessly, and people wait in hope for a salvation that never quite arrives. He added that the novel keeps the reader firmly hooked through a tightly constructed plot and skilful storytelling that sustains the search for answers right up to the final page.

About the author
Said Khatibi is an Algerian novelist and journalist, born in 1984. He studied French literature at the University of Algiers and cultural studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and has lived in Slovenia for several years, working in journalism since 2006. His previous novels include Forty Years Waiting for Isabel (2016), which won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2017, and Firewood of Sarajevo (2018), which made the IPAF shortlist in 2020. His novel The End of the Desert (2022) won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2023. This is the second time Khatibi has reached the final stages of the IPAF competition, making him the first Algerian writer to win the prize since 2020.

The 2026 shortlist
The other five novels shortlisted for this year's prize were The Origin of Species by Ahmad Abdulatif (Egypt), The Absence of Mai by Najwa Barakat (Lebanon), A Cloud Above My Head by Doaa Ibrahim (Egypt), The Seer by Diaa Jubaili (Iraq), and Siesta Dream by Amin Zaoui (Algeria).
The judging panel was made up of five members: Mohamed Elkadhi (Chair), a Tunisian researcher and critic; Shakir Nouri, an Iraqi writer and translator; Dheya Alkaabi, a Bahraini academic and critic; Laila Hyewon Baek, a South Korean academic; and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, a Palestinian writer and translator.

About the prize
The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is widely regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the Arab world. Its purpose is to recognise outstanding work in contemporary Arabic literature and to bring that literature to a wider global readership through translation and publication in other major languages. The prize is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre, part of the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.