Nashwa Nasreldin (Gowanlock) is a writer, editor, and literary translator of Arabic novels, short stories, poems, plays, screenplays and non-fiction. She is on the judging panel of the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, now in its 20th year.
Her published book-length translations include Shadow of the Sun, by Kuwaiti author Taleb Alrefai, and the collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, Shatila Stories, which was longlisted for the 2019 EBRD literature prize and published by Peirene Press.
She is also the translator of After Coffee, by Abdelrashid Mahmoudi’s, winner of the 2014 Sheikh Zayed Literature award. The English edition was a Fiction Finalist at the 2019 International Book Awards and was published by HBKU Press, formerly Bloomsbury-Qatar Foundation Publishing.
Her co-translation of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, was published by Penguin Random House. The French edition won France’s 2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger Best Foreign Book prize.
She writes poetry and literary essays, and is a freelance writer and commissioning editor of poetry, features and personal essays, with a focus on language, literature, history and current affairs, culture and the arts.
Nashwa is the incoming International Programmes Manager at the National Centre for Writing, a freelance editor with indie publishers including The Poetry Translation Centre, and a contributing editor at ArabLit.org and its sister publication, ArabLit Quarterly. She is a former programmes and documentaries producer at Al Jazeera English and a former video producer at Agence France Presse (AFP). She is also the founder of the Suffolk-based Bury St Edmunds Writers’ Workshop.
She holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and was awarded a mentorship with the British Centre for Literary Translation in 2014. Nashwa is on the translations advisory board of The Other Side of Hope, a journal publishing literature by refugees and immigrants.
Nashwa Nasreldin 