Slender Thorns: Award-winning Flash Fiction in English and Arabic (PDF)

In 2024, our three judges -- Mansoura Ez Eldin, Sarah Enany, and Shahla Ujayli -- chose fifteen flash-fiction finalists from a pool of more than 900 stories submitted in Arabic from around the world.

The selected short-short fictions, all 1,001 words or fewer, are from Morocco, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, and beyond.

In this collection, we bring together the fifteen finalists, with a few quotes from our conversations with the writers. The idea is both to place these short-short fictions in conversation with each other, and also to carry these diverse writers’ craft into another language: English. We have also translated the three winning stories into a new format, as audio performances in Arabic and English, available online.

We hope that readers of this bilingual collection will discover a new writer they admire, a new literary technique they can borrow for their own writing, a new idea for their practice of translation. And, most of all, that they find short stories to read and re-read, to become part of their own interior landscape.

PLEASE NOTE: The digital book is of necessity different from the print. While the print is facing page (English starting from one side, Arabic from the other) this is not a practical way to read an ebook.