The Judges

in the nineteenth year of the prize

 

Raphael Cohen was born in 1965 in Brighton and grew up in south London. He is a freelance translator in the fields of politics, development, and literature. He studied Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford University and the University of Chicago. He worked for nearly ten years with the renowned Egyptian publisher Dar Elias. His published translations include Mona Prince’s novel So You Can See (AUC Press, 2011), Ahlem Mostaghanemi’s Bridges of Constantine (Bloomsbury, 2014), George Yarak’s Guard of the Dead (AUC Press, 2019), Abdelmajid Sebbata’s The Secrets of Folder 42 (Banipal Books, 2024), the poetry collection Poems of Alexandria and New York by Ahmed Morsi (Banipal Books, 2021), and the non-fiction text The Jewish Agency and Syria During the Arab Revolt in Palestine by Mahmoud Muhareb (I. B. Tauris, 2023). He was a contributing editor for Banipal magazine. He has been living in Cairo since 2006.

    Raphael is Chair of the Judging Panel.

   Michael Caines

Michael Caines is an editor for the Times Literary Supplement and a co-founder of the Brixton Review of Books. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013), a volume editor for The Plays and Poems of Nicholas Rowe (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor of The TLS on the Romantics (The TLS, 2004). He has written for publications such as The Guardian, The Independent and The Wall Street Journal, and writes a Substack about book-collecting, called Bibliomania.

  Laura Watkinson

Laura Watkinson is an award-winning literary translator, mainly from Dutch into English. She also translates from German, Italian, and Frisian. She studied medieval and modern languages at Oxford University and has a keen interest in languages and cultures. Her translation of Tonke Dragt's classic children's book The Letter for the King was one of the 2015 winners of the Vondel Prize. She lives in Amsterdam.

 

 Nariman Youssef

Nariman Youssef is a literary translator and translation consultant based in London. Her translations include Mo(a)t: Stories from Arabic (UEAP, 2021), Nawal el-Saadawi's Off Limits: New Writings on Fear and Sin (Gingko, 2020), Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter (new edition, Interlink, 2020), Donia Kamal's Cigarette No. 7 (Hoopoe, 2018), as well as contributions to The Common, ArabLit Quarterly, Banipal, and Words Without Borders. Nariman holds a Translation Studies MSc from the University of Edinburgh and has, in recent years, managed an in-house translation team at the British Library, and led and curated translation workshops with multiple institutions. She was Translator in Residence at the BCLT for the Spring 2024 term.