When Cairo was Home to the ‘Nobel Prize’ of the Global South

In 1969, as the United States and the Soviet Union locked horns at the height of the Cold War, writers and academics from across the Global South gathered for the inaugural award ceremony of the Lotus Prize for Literature—a newly envisioned competitor to the Nobel Prize that championed ‘Third World’ solidarity, anti-imperialist politics, and national liberation. Though the prize ceremony was held in India, the permanent bureau of the organization behind the Lotus Prize, the Afro-Asia Writers’ Association (AAWP), had already been established years earlier and was headquartered in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.

Cairo did not become the home of the AAWP or its prestigious international award by chance. This was the Nasserist era, and Egypt was both a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement and one of the first countries in Africa and the Middle East to win its independence from colonial powers, and so it was perhaps natural that one of the earliest forums for postcolonial discourse outside the Euro-sphere would be found here. Both ideologically and economically, the country and its capital city were well-suited to hosting the AAWP and its mission of promoting solidarity among writers from Africa and Asia.

Along with awards like the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lotus Prize for Literature was part of a wider attempt to create alternatives to Western accolades like the Nobel Prize, which had long been criticized for its Eurocentrism. To cite an example, Naguib Mahfouz remains to date the only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Taha Hussein was nominated 21 times between 1949 and 1973, but never won it. During that same period, 20 of the 24 awardees were European, North American, or Australian.

By contrast, in 1969, the first winners of Lotus Prize were Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist Alex La Guma. Other awardees in the 1970s and 1980s included Ghassan Kanafani, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, Korean poet and playwright Kim Chi-Ha, and Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.

While the Lotus Prize was conferred yearly, it was punctuated by a quarterly publication of the same name. Lotus was a quarterly journal printed in Cairo and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in Arabic, French and English for global distribution to subscribers. In the midst of a bipolar world, this trilingual publication aimed to bring the margins to the forefront through richly-illustrated pages full of short stories, poetry, book reviews, and literary essays.

Like the prize, the magazine was also headquartered in Egypt, with Egyptian novelist and former Minister of Culture Yusuf Sibai serving as its first editor-in-chief. This was a role that Sibai would fill until his assassination in Cyprus in 1978 during the sixth Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference. The killing, which was carried out by a Palestinian faction in response to Sibai’s support for the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel, had widespread ramifications for Egypt, the region, and the future of Lotus.

In its immediate aftermath, Egyptian special forces raided the airport in Cyprus where the armed faction was still holding hostages, leading to an armed battle between the Cypriot National Guard and Egyptian soldiers that culminated in the severing of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Soon afterwards, and in response to Egypt’s growing isolation in the Arab world after its peace settlement with Israel, Lotus moved its headquarters to Beirut, and the Editor-in-Chief role was taken up by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Only a few years later, however, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Lotus was forced to move once more, this time to Tunis. It would only survive another ten years or so, until the dissolution of the Soviet Union—a major funder of the magazine and the prize—led as well to its own demise. The final Lotus Prize was awarded to the Yemeni poet Abdulaziz al-Maqaleh in 1988, the same year that Naguib Mahfouz became the first and only Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Some steps were taken in the 2010s to revive the prize, but they have so far not come to fruition, and what remains of Lotus today is mostly archival. Several university courses around the world continue to explore the publication as a one-of-a-kind transnational effort during the heyday of postcolonialism, but very little of the magazine itself remains publicly accessible. And while other initiatives like the BRICS Literary Award have recently arisen to recognize Global South writers (Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr won the inaugural edition of the BRICS Literary Award in 2025), none yet carry the same cachet as the Lotus Prize once did.

This article was informed by Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of Left, anti-imperial and anti-colonial critical production, and one of the few comprehensive sources on Lotus still available.