The past year has marked another stellar moment for Arab representation. There is no shortcut to telling our stories. A generation of Arab Americans and our brethren in the Arab world are taking our narratives into our own hands.
It is a true break from a past when Arab Americans found little positive representation — others misrepresented our stories. Our voices were few and far between. But our cultural moment has truly arrived.
First, two Arab Americans won National Book Awards in 2025:
The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)
by Rabih Alameddine
Winner, National Book Awards 2025 for Fiction
“In a tiny Beirut apartment, 63-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude.”
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
by Omar El Akkad
Winner, National Book Awards 2025 for Nonfiction
“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a chronicle of that painful realization, a moral grappling with what it means, as a citizen of the U.S., as a father, to carve out some sense of possibility in a time of carnage.”
Other Arab writers were longlisted, including Palestinian writer Nissim Tbakhi, the Tunisian-Swedish author Jonas Hassen Khemiri, and Egyptian writer Mohamed Kheir.
TERROR COUNTER
Longlist, National Book Awards 2025 for Poetry
“Moving through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi here attempts to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood.”
The Sisters
Longlist, National Book Awards 2025 for Fiction
“Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.”
“The Sister” was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times.
Sleep Phase
Longlist, National Book Awards 2025 for Translated Literature
“After seven years in prison, Warif is released to a changed Cairo. This new Cairo, busy with expats and bureaucrats, is proving disorienting: what is he supposed to make of these self-assured newcomers who are so certain of his obsolescence, his subjugation, his solitude?”
The National Book Critics Circle also recognized Arab writers this year:
“I’ll Tell You When I’m Home,” by the Palestinian American writer Hala Alyan, in the autobiography category, and “Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece” by Nasser Rabah in the translation category.
Nussaibah Younis was shortlisted for the UK’s “WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION” for her debut novel “Fundamentally”.
“A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.”
Palestinian-American Susan Muaddi Darraj was shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her “debut novel-in-stories that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore.”
What Arab representation did you enjoy recently? Let us know in the comments!
