Translator Ibrahim Fawzy curates this special section on beloved and award-winning Egyptian novelist Hamdi Abu Golayyel, chronicler of Egypt’s dispossessed, and scribe of the poetry and culture of the Bedouin.
As Abu Golayyel says in his talk with Fawzy:
I’m a writer without a cause; I don’t resist injustice or oppression for example, and I believe that it’s not the burden of the novel, but that the novel is supposed to delight and entertain. Sometimes, though, I feel responsible for the Bedouins, since if I hadn’t written about them—including myself—we would have remained in the shadows.
Fawzy and Abu Golayyel also talk about the author’s work, his literary influences, and the author-translator relationship.
Read:
A Talk with Hamdi Abu Golayyel: On Bringing Bedouin Language & Culture Out of the Shadows
A Playlist for Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s ‘The Men Who Swallowed the Sun’
An excerpt of The Men Who Swallowed the Sun on the Hoopoe Fiction website
BULAQ’s “Stealing, Drug-dealing, and the Epic of Egyptian Migration.”
Extras:
Prose: An excerpt from Abu Golayyel’s Thieves in Retirement, translated by Marilyn Booth
Video: Streets and Stories: a conversation with Hamdi Abu Golayyel
