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Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo, Egypt. A winner of the Samir Kassir Award for Freedom of the Press, he holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and his work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, and Guernica. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. More about this author >
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From the publisher:
In 2013, two years after the January 25 revolution, 17-year-old Abdelrahman ElGendy was a budding student activist in Cairo. Hope for a free Egypt had dissipated, and when that summer’s military coup unleashed unprecedented massacres of protesters, Abdelrahman didn’t hesitate—he joined the street movement. His father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a mass demonstration. But minutes after they arrived, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown, and their lives were shattered.
Crushed inside a holding cell, Abdelrahman first heard the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—We Will Remain Here. He wondered: if no one wanted to remain behind bars, what was the “here” they chose to inhabit?
Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner chasing this Huna, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. As his body broke under the grind of incarceration with no end in sight, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the page. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, read and wrote voraciously, and, through writing, bore witness.
