Join award-winning Egyptian author Youssef Rakha for a discussion of his latest revelatory and revolutionary novel, The Dissenters.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna – these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, climbs to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s; as a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo; a self-made divorcee and a lover; a ‘pious mama’ donning her hijab; and, finally, as a feminist activist during the Arab Spring.

Charged by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Described as a ‘tremendous, confident novel’ by Bina Shah and a ‘stylish, deftly told story about a stubbornly cosmopolitan and nonconformist set of characters’ by Amitav Ghosh, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom and political agency.

To celebrate the UK edition of the novel published by Peninsula Press, Youssef will be talking to writer Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou about the development of his first English-language novel, writing in and about revolutionary times, and how his work as a literary translator, poet, cultural journalist, teacher, and photographer has shaped his fictional output to date.