Abstract
Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker whose work has received international acclaim and been translated into English, Spanish, and Italian, among others. He has written four novels — Rogers (2007); Using Life (2014, trans. in 2017); And Tigers to My Room (2020); and Happy Endings (2023) — two of which depict the catastrophic effects of futurist urban development projects in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Using Life and And Tigers to My Room employ science fiction (SF) storytelling to imagine the environmental futures of Cairo and NEOM. These texts problematise ambitious projects of urbanism and architecture in the Middle East, which aim to construct technologically enhanced and highly gentrified future cities while dismissing social justice concerns and the demands of the people. In addition to these SF novels, Naji has also edited a science fiction anthology, Egypt +100 Stories from a century after Tahrir (2024), which brings together SF stories envisioning the futures of Egypt from diverse perspectives. In 2016, Naji was sentenced to two years of prison following a reader’s accusation that an excerpt from Using Life, published in an Egyptian literary journal, violated public morality. With the support of authors and literary organisations worldwide, Naji’s case gained traction on international media platforms, and he was released later that year. Naji’s memoir, Rotten Evidence - Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison (2020), which chronicles his experiences in prison, has recently been published in English translation. Naji’s work has received the Dubai Press Club Arab Journalism Award (2012), the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award (2016), and The Open Eye Award (2016).
Merve Tabur
Lecturer/Researcher
I am a scholar of comparative literature and environmental humanities, focusing on how environmental destruction is depicted in speculative fiction, film, and visual arts from Southwest Asia/North Africa and its Anglophone diasporas.