Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Huna, a memoir exploring the politics of dissent and erasure through the lens of his six-year political incarceration in Egypt, forthcoming from Hogarth, Penguin Random House.

 

A former six-year political prisoner in Egypt between 2013 and 2020, Abdelrahman writes about counter-narratives, state-manufactured archival silences, and the dismantling of liberal allyship as an extension of colonial violence, in favor of accompliceship in an interconnected struggle for liberation.

 

Arrested at 17 and released at 24, he started and earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Ain Shams University while in prison.  ​

Abdelrahman's work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, AGNI, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Mada Masr and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, LitHub, Words Without Borders, The Margins, Cultural Anthropology, and elsewhere. Abdelrahman's essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net.

 

A Samir Kassir Freedom of Press Award winner, Abdelrahman is a 2024-25 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. His work has received awards or fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Heinz Foundation, The Arab American National Museum, Tin House Writers' Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is a winner of the 2024 Courage to Write grant by the de Groot Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism. ​

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He is represented by Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency.