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Mohamed Kheir is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and lyricist born in Cairo, Egypt in 1978. He won the Egyptian Ministry of Culture Award for his first poetry collection Leil Khargi, and both of his story collections—Afarit Al Radio and Remsh Al Ein—received the Sawiris Cultural Award. More about this author >
Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic literature living in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalunya. He has translated several novels and prose works into English—most recently Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal, winner of the 2024 James Tait Black Prize for Biography, and Sleep Phase by Mohamed Kheir. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
After seven years in prison, Warif is released to a changed Cairo. Freedom so far has been endless, inscrutable meetings with official-looking strangers, trying to get his job as a translator back. This new Cairo, busy with expats and bureaucrats, is proving disorienting: what is he supposed to make of these self-assured newcomers who are so certain of his obsolescence, his subjugation, his solitude? They seem happy to provide him with a salary, if he’s willing to give up the work that gave his life meaning. As his encounters more-and-more resemble interrogations and the futility of trying to escape the system set against him threatens to suffocate him, Warif escapes into the vivid colors of the city, looking deeper and deeper into the food, the people, the buildings, and the flowers, until what’s real blurs into fantasy.
