Youssef Rakha author biography, plus links to books by Youssef Rakha.

Youssef Rakha

Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist and journalist who writes in both Arabic and English. His interests include the role of obscenity in Arab society and the possibility of a post-Muslim perspective. His first two novels The Book of the Sultan's Seal and The Crocodiles appeared in English in early 2015. Frequently anthologized and translated into many languages, he has written widely on Arabic literature and Egyptian history.

Youssef's 2006 photo travelogue Beirut Shi Mahal was nominated for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage. He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 Festival in 2010. His first novel, The Book of the Sultan's Seal, won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkey's translation, and his third, Paulo, was on the long list of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2017 and won the 2017 Sawiris Award.

Born, raised and based in Cairo, Youssef graduated from Hull University, England, in 1998. He has worked as a cultural journalist, literary translator, and creative writing coach since then. He founded and edits тнє ѕυℓтαη'ѕ ѕєαℓ: Cairo's Coolest Cosmopolitan Hotel, a bilingual online space.

Youssef's writing is featured in many web and print publications including the Atlantic, BOMB, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and the New York Times. He has been interviewed in, among many others, Music and Literature, Reuters and Words Without Borders, and his work is celebrated in Granta, The New York Review of Books, Reorient, Full Stop, and many others.​​

His work has prompted appearances in, among many other events across the world, the Hay Festival in the UK (2011), the Ritratti di Poesia in Rome (2015), the Internationales Literaturfestival Leukerbad in Switzerland (2016), La Comédie du livre in Montpellier, France (2017), and Dubai's Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature's anniversary round (2018). He has judged film as well as writing competitions, and is on the jury of the True Story Award.

This biography was last updated on 02/04/2025.

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