Youssef Rakha

Author of
The Dissenters (Graywolf Press, 2025)
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.

Twitter / Bluesky / Substack / TheRakha.net / Represented by Ayesha Pande

The Dissenters (Graywolf Press, 2025)

A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

Certain as I've never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna--these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a "pious mama" donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister--who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years--in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish,The Dissentersis a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

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.