IPAF 2025

This year’s six shortlisted novels are notable for their focus on the humanity of their protagonists, whether it be a Druze woman in a twenty-first century Lebanese village (The Women’s Covenant), or the Islamic cleric Imam Abu Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali in the twelfth century (Danishmand). They depict human journeys, such as that of a young blind woman exploring her four senses in The Touch of Light, and the journey of the Andalusian Issa or Jesús searching for his mother’s killer in The Andalusian Messiah, blending reality and imagination, and mixing tragedy with comedy. In The Valley of the Butterflies, the main character uses sarcasm as a weapon to confront tragic reality; while in The Prayer of Anxiety, the individual figures can also be viewed as political or social symbols, and the novel’s lifelike scenarios can be interpreted on many different levels.