Palestinian Author Nasser Abu Srour Wins 2025 Prix de La Littérature Arabe – ARABLIT & ARABLIT QUARTERLY

By Olivia Snaije

The awards ceremony for the 2025 Prix de la littérature arabe — held at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris on November 18 — was an emotionally charged affair.

The event, which coincided with PEN International’s ongoing Day of the Imprisoned Writer, featured winning author and former prisoner Nasser Abu Srour. Speaking in a video recording from Egypt, where he was deported by Israel in a prisoner exchange in October 2025, Abu Srour thanked the jury for the prize, given for his prison memoir, Je suis ma liberté (The Tale of a Wall), translated into French by Stéphanie Dujols. This year, the Palestinian author said, the prize recognized “a difficult, troubled language, which is the language of prison or the language of ‘inside,’ as we prisoners call it.”

He had imagined Paris from his prison cell, he said, and in one of his poems he wrote that Paris looked beautiful from where he was.

“I was in a small cell, but it was large enough for me to see the City of Lights from it, a city not only bright but gleaming. I wondered, then, about this light that could reach my cell and my stolen country and my murdered people.”

He reflected on how Paris had been assaulted under occupation during World War II, and how it had been liberated.

“I see in your prize a thread of light, and I hope these threads multiply and increase until they radiate.”

Nasser Abu Srour’s remarkable prison memoir, The Tale of a Wall, is an inspiring example of the journey an author and a book can make. Written inside the walls of the Israeli prisons where Abu Srour spent 33 years, the manuscript was smuggled out over two years and three months to a publisher in Beirut. The rights were later sold to a publisher in New York, after which it was translated into seven languages, among them English and French.

The Prix de la littérature arabe, with a value of 8,000 €, is organized by the Jean-Luc Lagardère Foundation and the Institut du Monde Arabe. This year was the first iteration of an accompanying translation prize with a value of 2,000 €, campaigned for by Actes Sud/Sindbad editor Farouk Mardam-Bey. It was awarded to Abu Srour’s translator, Stéphanie Dujols, who thanked Abu Srour “for existing, and for having such a unique voice.”  She added that she would be using the purse to help the wounded from the Gaza genocide who are currently in hospitals in Cairo where she lives. Dujols recently won a special jury prize for her translation of Abu Srour’s book at the Grand Prix de Traduction of the city of Arles.

Published by Gallimard in its world literature collection, Abu Srour’s Tale of a Wall was voted for unanimously by the jury from a shortlist that included works by authors such as Hanan al-Shaykh, Shady Lewis, and Mohammed Alnaas.

Abu Srour’s editor, Julia Nannicelli, said that when she first read his text, “I was struck by the quiet strength of his voice, his dignity, and the moral elevation he achieves even while incarcerated. There’s this device he creates and defines in the very first pages: the personified wall, transformed into an object of transference, the wall that no longer signifies oppression but rather a refuge that gives him stability… It takes immense moral strength to achieve that. You can sense that it’s not a posture, and this authenticity is what gives the book its power. The scope is also remarkable, all beautifully rendered by the immeasurable work of the translator, Stéphanie Dujols. And, of course, the poetry and dreamlike quality that flow throughout the text firmly establishes it in the literary field.”

But no one, Nannicelli said at the awards ceremony, could have imagined that Nasser Abu Srour would be freed from his walls by the time the award came about.

Since the original publication of Abu Srour’s book in 2022 by Dar Al-Adab, the situation for Palestinians — not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank — and especially for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, has reached unimaginable horrors following October 7.

A student of English literature who grew up in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, Abu Srour was arrested when he was 23 and accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. While in prison, he completed his bachelor’s degree and obtained a master’s. In his video address, he said:

“I believe that each of us has, from the time they are born, the right to tell their own stories. I too, had this right, but I wasn’t able to exercise it. Thank you for giving me back my voice and giving me the opportunity to tell my story, the story of a land that is harsh and demanding, a story of a people that haven’t had a chance to rest or catch their breath…I hope that this chance is given to many other voices that have been silenced by force.”

“Nasser Abu Srour could have restricted himself to writing a personal testimony,” said Nannicelli, “but he was able to transform an autobiographical experience into literature. And only literature withstands the test of time.”

Other Press publisher Judith Gurewich, who first published Abu Srour’s memoir in English, translated by Luke Leafgren, said that she hoped his international publishers would “join forces to bring his voice loud and clear everywhere. It is now our calling to try, the best we can, to absorb what he has taught us and become his ambassador and, also to slowly but surely try to convince him to share the strange experiences of being now in charge of the phenomenology of everyday life.”

Dar Al Adab publisher Rana Idriss, who visited Abu Srour in Egypt last month following his release, has just published Abu Srour’s next book, a philosophical exploration of the act of writing from a prison cell.

Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.