Youssef Rakha
Author of
Emissaries (Barakunan, 2023)
Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (Pivot / Palgrave Macmillan / Arab Cinema Series, 2020)
The Crocodiles (Seven Stories, 2015)
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist and essayist who writes in both Arabic and English, thinking about Egypt, Arabs and Islam. Born and raised in Cairo, he graduated from Hull University, England, in 1998. He has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach since then. He lives with his family in Cairo.
books by Youssef
Emissaries (Barakunan, 2023)
A Collection of Short Stories
Youssef Rakha's first volume of original English fiction is a collection of revolution-juggling, Philip K Dick-, Ballard- and Burroughs-inspired short stories about the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Cairo. In these speculative dramas focusing on the Arab Spring, its wake and its ruins, the reader is led by a colorful cast of characters through a hypnagogic cityscape pulsating with the specters of fascism, political Islam and suppressed queerness.
Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (Palgrave Macmillan (Pivot): Arab Cinema Series, 2020)
In his introduction to this creative nonfiction essay on modern Egyptian identity, which takes its cue from one of Egypt’s most epoch-making films, the film scholar Nezar Andary writes, “In effect, Rakha accomplishes that masterful “task of the translator” proposed by Walter Benjamin. The task, to summarize the latter thinker’s well-known essay, is an attentiveness to form, rhythm, and structures, all the while searching for the radical intent of the text.”
The Crocodiles (Seven Stories, 2015)
Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo.