Honey Hunger - Hardcover

by Zahran Alqasmi (Author), Marilyn Booth (Translator)

WINNER OF THE 2025 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC LITERARY TRANSLATION

"An evocative, unpredictable novel."--Words Without Borders

A breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hope

Azzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching for wild hives, he encounters Thamna, a lone shepherd woman, on a mountain slope and is captivated by her and her honey-colored eyes.

Across the breathtaking vistas of Oman's remote mountains and plains, Azzan's troubled past and present unfold. A disappointment to his family, he turns to drink, and ultimately discovers the healing power of his beekeeping, before an accident in which he loses all.

Zahran Alqasmi's masterful novel thrums forward with a subtle momentum. His lucid, poetic writing conveys a visceral sense of time and place, of the fragile ecologies inhabited by both bees and humans alike, in this intense and compelling novel of loss and hope.

Author Biography

Zahran Alqasmi is an Omani poet and novelist, born in the Sultanate of Oman in 1974. He is also a medical doctor, with a specialization in infectious diseases, and keeps bees. Honey Hunger is his third of four published novels and his English language debut. In 2023 he won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for The Water Diviner. He has also published ten poetry collections and a collection of short stories.

Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University. She has translated many works of Arabic fiction into English. Her translations of Omani author Jokha Alharthi includeBitter Orange Tree and Celestial Bodies, which was awarded the International Booker Prize. She has also translated Hoda Barakat, Hassan Daoud, Elias Khoury, Latifa al-Zayyat, and Nawal al-Saadawi. Her research publications focus on Arabophone women's writing and the ideology of gender debates in the nineteenth century, most recently The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt.