Abdelrahman ElGendy

Abdelrahman ElGendy is a writer and translator from Cairo, whose award-winning work examines state violence, empire, and exile, attending to the entanglements of local and global oppressions and the solidarities that emerge across them. 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. ElGendy’s candid conversations about political repression, free speech, student activism, human rights, and more resonate with a wide array of audiences.

One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Most Anticipated Books of 2026, Huna is ElGendy’s debut memoir. In 2013, seventeen-year-old ElGendy was a budding student activist in Cairo. Hope for a free Egypt had dissipated, and when that summer’s military coup unleashed unprecedented massacres of protesters, Abdelrahman didn’t hesitate—he joined the street movement. His father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him. Just minutes after their arrival, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown, and their lives were forever changed.

Crushed inside a holding cell, ElGendy first heard the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—We Will Remain Here. He wondered: If no one wanted to remain behind bars, what was the “here” they chose to inhabit? ElGendy would spend the next six years as a political prisoner chasing this Huna, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. As his body broke under the seemingly endless grind of incarceration, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the page. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, read and wrote voraciously, and, through writing, bore witness. ElGendy now shares his remarkable story with readers, offering not a promise of hope but a provocation. Huna is a reckoning with what it takes—and what it costs—to remain when erased, and of what endures, perhaps more faithfully, beyond hope.

As a speaker, ElGendy brings a compelling and resilient voice to conversations about political repression, human rights, free speech, and student activism. Drawing on his experience of the Egyptian revolution and incarceration at seventeen, he connects personal experience to larger questions of justice, solidarity, and liberation. ElGendy also offers a rare perspective on writing through trauma, exploring the politics and ethics of transforming suffering into literature and the power of storytelling to preserve memory in the face of erasure. At his truly transformative events, he invites audiences to engage with his experiences not simply as testimony, but as a point of departure for examining the urgent questions that concern us all.

ElGendy’s work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, among other publications. His poetry and prose translations appear in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, AGNI, Words Without Borders, and more. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, Best of the Net, and Deep Vellum’s Best Literary Translations.

A Samir Kassir Freedom of the Press Award winner, ElGendy holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. While in prison between 2013 and 2020, he started and earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Ain Shams University.​

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