Mysterious men are rounding up street children and enrolling them in a so-called "rehabilitation program", designed to indoctrinate them for the military-backed regime's imminent crackdown on its opponents. Across town, thousands of protesters encamp in a city square demanding the return of the recently deposed president.
Reminiscent of recent clashes in Egypt, and reflective of political movements worldwide where civilians face off against state power, Abdel Aziz deftly illustrates the universal human struggles between resisting and succumbing to an oppressive regime.
Here is a Body is a courageous and powerful depiction of the state cooptation of human bodies, the dehumanization of marginalized groups, and the use of inflammatory religious rhetoric to manipulate a narrative.
Über die Autorin / über den Autor:Basma Abdel Aziz is an award-winning writer, sculptor, and psychiatrist, specializing in treating victims of torture. A weekly columnist for Egypt's al-Shorouk newspaper, she was named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker, and a Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute top influencer in the Arab world. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the winner of the Sawiris Cultural Award, the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces Award, and the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award. Her critically acclaimed debut novel The Queue won the English PEN Translation Award and has been translated into Turkish, Portuguese, Italian, and German. She lives in Cairo, Egypt.
Jonathan Wright is the translator of the winning novel in the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and twice winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and was formerly the Reuters bureau chief in Cairo. He has translated Alaa Al Aswany, Youssef Ziedan, Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, and Hassan Blasim. He lives in London, UK.
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