Mīkrūfūn kātim Sawt (Muted Microphone) by Mohammed Tarazi has won the 2024 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, sponsored by the American University in Cairo Press and honoring the best contemporary novel published in Arabic in the past two years. Lebanese novelist Tarazi receives a $5,000 cash prize and an English translation of the book that will be published by AUC Press's fiction imprint, Hoopoe.
Head judge Sarah Enany said the book was chosen because of "its deep metaphor and imagery and powerful characters as well as its smooth narrative style. Although it discusses Lebanon today, it emerges from the limits of its own setting in space and time to unveil a general human reality for those of us in contemporary society who live in cities that stifle souls and kill dreams."
The AUC Press has been the originating publisher of Naguib Mahfouz's English-language editions for more than 30 years and has also been responsible for the licensing of some 600 foreign-language editions of the Nobel laureate's works in more than 40 languages since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.