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 Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

Praise

“The Dissenters is a stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and non-conformist set of characters whose lives set them on a collision course with Egypt's military regime leading up to the Tahrir suprising and its grim aftermath.”—AMITAV GHOSH

“One of the most original and inventivewriters of his generation.” —OMAR ROBERT HAMILTON

“The Dissenters is an encyclopedia of all the ways bodies are imprisoned or made free—by politics, sex, power, love, death. An Egypt of the senses, mind, and heart, laid open and dissected in every manner. This book will seduce you from its opening pages and stun you with its last. A tremendous, confident novel from Youssef Rakha, assuming his rightful place on the literary stage.”—BINA SHAH

“Youssef Rakhais the rare writer who is actually paying attention and trying to make sense of the world while many are devolving into despair. The Dissenterscreates a world outside the tinted windows of power, even if that means challenging the abyss.”—YURI HERRERA

“With thrilling prose and a narrative that flows as relentless as the Nile, Youssef Rakha takes us on the big dipper of Egyptian history from Nasser to now. The Dissenters is by turns haunted, horrifying, and hilarious.” —TIM MACKINTOSH-SMITH

“The Dissenters is the book of witnessing par excellence, telling not the story of just one woman or one Egypt, but rather of all of us who are of these geographies.”—SALAR ABDOH

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.