Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian writer of fiction and nonfiction working in Arabic and English. He is the author of the novels The Book of the Sultan’s Seal (Interlink, 2014) and The Crocodiles (Seven Stories Press, 2015) as well as Paolo, which was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award. The Dissenters (Graywolf, 2025) is his first novel to be written in English.
He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 event in 2010. His work has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic, BOMB, The Dial, the Kenyon Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, and many others. It is widely anthologized and translated.
Youssef is the only child of a disillusioned Marxist and a woman who struggled against incredible odds to go to university. He lives with his own family in Cairo, where he was born and raised. Among other things, he has worked as a photographer, cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach.
But above all, I think, your major achievement is in being what Foucault would call “a discourse initiator” — someone who single handedly changes a discipline, and in this case the discipline of the Arabic novel. You are my al Jabarti of the Arabic novel. — Anton Shammas
What happened in Egypt around its second revolution was a mixture of grandeur and pettiness, of sorrow and mirth, of expectation and despair, of theory and flesh. All of which may be found in The Crocodiles, a novel where reality sheds its veil to reveal its true face — that of a timeless mythology. — Amin Maalouf
Rakha accomplishes that masterful “task of the translator” proposed by Walter Benjamin.8 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. — Nazar Andary
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, poet and essayist working in both Arabic and English.