‘Women Of Karantina’ selected for the Fiction Longlist of the 2015 Ft/Oppenheimerfunds Emerging Voices Awards

​June 16, 2015, Cairo – Nael Eltoukhy’s novel Women of Karantina, translated by Robin Moger and published in 2014 by The American University in Cairo Press (AUC Press), has been selected for the fiction longlist of the 2015 FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Awards. Chosen by a panel of distinguished international judges, the Emerging Voices Awards are given this year for extraordinary artistic work in three categories, from three regions—fiction from Africa and the Middle East, films from the Asia-Pacific region, and visual arts from Latin America and the Caribbean. The names of the three finalists in the fiction category will be announced on 7 August, and the winner will be declared at the awards ceremony to be held in New York on 5 October. Women of Karantina is a satiric novel about crime and excess set in a future Alexandria, that has been widely praised for its inventiveness, pace, and subversive humor. Eltoukhy, a 36-year-old Egyptian writer who was born in Kuwait, graduated from the Hebrew Section in the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University in Egypt. His first collection of short stories was published in 2003, and he is the author of four novels. He is also a journalist, blogger, and a translator of books from Hebrew into Arabic. Women of Karantina is available at AUC Press Bookstores and all other good bookstores in Egypt, and worldwide through all major booksellers. The AUC Press founded in 1960, publishes annually up to 60 wide-ranging academic texts and general interest books on ancient and modern Egypt and the Middle East, as well as Arabic literature in translation, for distribution worldwide, and maintains a backlist of more than 800 high-quality scholarly, literary, and general interest publications, including e-books, making it the region’s leading English-language publisher. The AUC Press, which established the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996, has been the primary publisher of Naguib Mahfouz’s English-language editions for more than twenty-five years, and has also been responsible for the publication of some 600 foreign-language editions of the Nobel laureate’s works in more than 40 languages around the world since the author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. For information on AUC Press visit www.aucpress.com