IPAF shortlisted novels top bestseller lists at this year's Cairo Book Fair

8 February 2012

At the 43rd Cairo International Book Fair, literary works held their own against political analyses of the Arab Spring and those exposing the crimes of the former heads of state of Egypt and Libya, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi.  
Cairo-based Al-Dustur newspaper reported on the sales figures of several major publishers at the fair and found that novels by IPAF shortlisted authors, a poetry collection and a 24 volume encyclopedia on Islam were the bestselling books alongside some political works. Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge by the Egyptian author Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, shortlisted for this year's Prize, was the bestseller for its publisher Dar al-Ain, followed by Tayyeb Saleh's classic Season of Migration to the North, whilst Nasser Iraq's The Unemployed, the other Egyptian novel contending for IPAF 2012 , sold the most copies for the Egyptian-Lebanese Publishing House along with The Last Days of Mubarak by Abd al-Latif al-Manawy.

Also present at the fair was former IPAF winner Youssef Ziedan, whose latest novel, Impossible, was a bestseller for Dar al-Shorouk. Unlike Azazeel which won IPAF in 2009 and is set in the 5th century AD, his new work follows a young Egyptian in the present day who travels to Afghanistan and ends up incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.