Congratulations to our 2022 First Novel Prize winner, Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English (Graywolf Press)! The award was announced at The Center for Fiction Annual Awards Benefit on December 6, 2022 at Cipriani 25 Broadway. Author Rebecca Makkai presented Naga with the award, which carries with it a prize of $15,000.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English was selected by a panel of distinguished American writers—Matt Bell, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Megha Majumdar, Rebecca Makkai, and Chigozie Obioma. The shortlist also included Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades (Penguin Random House/Random House), The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan (Simon & Schuster), NSFW by Isabel Kaplan (Macmillan/Henry Holt and Company), Little Rabbit by Alyssa Songsiridej (Bloomsbury Publishing), Big Girl by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan (W. W. Norton & Company/Liveright), and The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara (W. W. Norton & Company). The shortlisted authors each received $1,000.
Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Apart from her debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, she is also the author of the verse-novel Washes, Prays. Naga teaches at the American University in Cairo.
If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English takes place in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, when an Egyptian-American daughter of immigrants, nostalgic for the country she’s never lived in, falls in love with a man she meets in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but is now addicted to cocaine and living in a shack. When their relationship takes a violent turn, the fallout exposes the gaps in American identity politics and reexamines the faces of empire.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka was honored with The Center for Fiction Lifetime of Excellence in Fiction Award. To mark the occasion, Soyinka appeared in conversation with The Center for Fiction’s Board Chair Erroll McDonald. The Center for Fiction also recognized Kenneth Chenault, this year’s Honorary Benefit Chair, and honored Sarah McGrath, Editor-in-Chief of Riverhead Books, with The Center for Fiction 2022 Medal for Editorial Excellence, which was presented by New York Times bestselling author Brit Bennett.
In a tribute to Booker Prize-winning author and The Center for Fiction Writers Council member Salman Rushdie, following the violent attempt on his life earlier this year, authors Bill Buford and Colum McCann read passages from Rushdie’s work. The evening was emceed by Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author Jennifer Egan and featured virtuoso performances by internationally acclaimed jazz pianist and composer Marta Sánchez.
Funds raised by The Center for Fiction Annual Awards Benefit support our public performance events, KidsRead / KidsWrite programming for NYC public school students, and The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowships. Thank you to everyone, near and far, who made this such a remarkable evening.
2022 First Novel Prize Winner
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If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
By Noor Naga
Published by Graywolf Press
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, an Egyptian American woman and a man from the village of Shobrakheit meet at a café in Cairo. He was a photographer of the revolution, but now finds himself unemployed and addicted to cocaine, living in a rooftop shack. She is a nostalgic daughter of immigrants “returning” to a country she’s never been to before, teaching English and living in a light-filled flat with balconies on all sides. They fall in love and he moves in. But soon their desire—for one another, for the selves they want to become through the other—takes a violent turn that neither of them expected.
A dark romance exposing the gaps in American identity politics, especially when exported overseas, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English is at once ravishing and wry, scathing and tender. Told in alternating perspectives, Noor Naga’s experimental debut examines the ethics of fetishizing the homeland and punishing the beloved . . . and vice versa. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, what are the new faces (and races) of empire? When the revolution fails, how long can someone survive the disappointment? Who suffers and, more crucially, who gets to tell about it?