In the opening pages of Ahmed Saadawi’s novel “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” a suicide bombing shakes a neighborhood in the Iraqi capital:

They all turned towards the explosion at the moment a mass of flame and smoke ate up the cars and human bodies surrounding them, cut several electricity lines and perhaps killed a number of birds—with the shattering of glass, the caving in of doors, the cracking of nearby walls, the sinking of some old roofs in the Bataween neighborhood, and other unforeseen damages that all burst forth at once, in the same instant.

Eruptions of violence, as unavoidable and mysterious as storms, are part of the atmosphere of the book, which just won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Matter-of-factly, Saadawi sets out a reality—Baghdad in 2005—so gothic in its details (a man is troubled after seeing “a blood stain and bits of hair from a scalp”; after another explosion, a man dies alongside his donkey, “their flesh mixed”) that, when the novel makes a turn to the supernatural, it barely shocks.

In the explosion’s aftermath, a man named Hadi al-Attag, a middle-aged, hard-drinking scavenger and antiquities seller, loiters at the scene, smoking a cigarette. As firemen hose away the last human remains, he reaches down and picks up a nose, the last thing he needs to complete a body, made up entirely of discarded parts of bombing victims, that he has been assembling in secret. A storm hits the city and the body disappears. Following a strange chain of events, the creature comes to life and starts taking revenge on its killers. It learns that its body parts belong to criminals as well as innocents; its vigilantism is complicated by a need to continue killing simply to replenish itself.

In an interview, Saadawi said that his “Frankenstein” is “the fictional representation of the process of everyone killing everyone.” The story rotates among a large cast of characters, moving briskly from dilapidated alleys to gated compounds, drawing the reader into a web of mysterious crimes with moments of occasional lightness, whether from gossiping neighbors or advice-swapping ghosts. The book’s violence and sense of political urgency is common in contemporary fiction from the Arabic-speaking world. For Western audiences, Arabic literature in translation is an invaluable counterpoint to media reports and sweeping politico-cultural theories, exposing us to the breadth of the region’s creativity and the depth of individual experiences.

Saadawi is the first Iraqi to win the I.P.A.F. (often referred to as the “Arabic Booker”), now in its seventh year, and his victory has been hailed by fellow Iraqi and Arab writers as a sign of the resilience of Baghdad, a historically literary and literate city that has suffered immensely since the embargo of the nineteen-eighties. The renowned Al Mutanabbi Street, named after a famous tenth-century poet, where Baghdad’s booksellers display their wares under colonnaded arches, was the target of a devastating bombing in 2007. Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a travelling collection of custom-made books inspired by the historic district, was one response to this catastrophe.

The I.P.A.F. is sponsored by Abu Dhabi, and, like many recent acts of cultural patronage on the part of the wealthy emirates of the Arabian peninsula, it is a bid for regional and international recognition. The region’s most traditionally active state sponsors of culture—Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo—have been devastated and exhausted by invasions and uprisings. There is a certain irony to the idea that the oil-rich monarchies of the Gulf—where freedom of expression does not exactly flourish, and where the literary heritage consists largely of oral poetry, a tradition that continues to this day with hugely popular “American Idol”-style poetry competitions—should set themselves up as the new centers of Arabic literature. But, to struggling writers across the region, the fifty-thousand-dollar prize and the promise of translation and publication abroad is very welcome.

The I.P.A.F. was created, according to its Web site, “to address the limited international availability of high quality Arab fiction.” In fact, in the years after 9/11, Western readers have been increasingly interested in literature from this part of the world, a trend that was given a considerable push by the international success of the bestselling Egyptian novel “The Yacoubian Building.” Yes, quite a bit of the interest has been what the Iraqi author and N.Y.U. literature professor Sinan Antoon calls “forensic”—books used as tools to diagnose the political pathologies of the region. And yes, publishers have a penchant for supposedly controversial material (extra points if a book has been banned or promises to take readers “behind the veil”). Nonetheless, we should celebrate the fact that we have greater access to more literary works from the Arab world than ever before, at a time when the region’s literature is proliferating with new approaches, genres, and voices.

The finalists Saadawi beat out for the prize included “A Rare Blue Bird That Flies With Me,” an account of a botched coup against the king of Morocco and the brutal repression of the so-called years of lead. Also nominated was “Tashari,” another Iraqi novel that chronicles the life of a female country doctor in the nineteen fifties and the dispersal of her emigrating children (the title is an Iraqi term that means “a shot from a hunting rifle scattered in several directions”); and “The Blue Elephant,” a psychedelic Egyptian murder mystery set in a psychiatric hospital.

Saadawi’s book will probably not be available in English for several years. Bloomsbury Qatar, a new publishing imprint that aims to make more Arabic literature available in translation, has just released an English translation of the 2010 I.P.A.F. winner, a Saudi novel called “She Throws Sparks” (published in the U.S. as “Throwing Sparks”), which is extremely dark and graphic. On the first page, the narrator—a hired enforcer from the slums of Jeddah, living and working in the palace of a shadowy, terrifying master—sodomizes one of the master’s enemies, a form of torture we learn is his unwanted job. This spring, Bloomsbury Qatar will also release the 2011 I.P.A.F. winner, the Moroccan writer Mohammed Achaari’s “The Arch and the Butterfly,” about a middle-aged leftist who discovers that his son has died as a jihadist in Afghanistan. Another I.P.A.F. runner-up, the Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa’s “No Knives in the Kitchen of This City,” a tragic family saga set in Aleppo that spans half a century of Baathist rule, is forthcoming from the American University in Cairo Press.