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Rotten Evidence 

by Ahmed Naji (Egypt)

Translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls

Published by McSweeney’s, 17 October 2023

https://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/rotten-evidence-reading-and-writing-in-an-egyptian-prison/

Pbk ISBN: 9781952119835. £15.98 
E-book ISBN: 9781952119842 £12.99

In February 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for “violating public decency”, after an excerpt of his novel Using Life reportedly caused a reader to experience heart palpitations. Naji ultimately served ten months of that sentence, in a group cellblock in Cairo’s Tora Prison.

Rotten Evidence is a chronicle of those months. Through Naji’s writing, the world of Egyptian prison comes into vivid focus, with its cigarette-based economy, homemade chess sets, and well-groomed fixers. Naji’s storytelling is lively and uncompromising, filled with rare insights into both the mundane and grand questions he confronts.

How does one secure a steady supply of fresh vegetables without refrigeration? How does one write and revise a novel in a single notebook? Fight boredom? Build a clothes hanger? Negotiate with the chief of intelligence? And, most crucially, how does one make sense of a senseless oppression: finding oneself in prison for the act of writing fiction? Genuine and defiant, this book stands as a testament to the power of the creative mind, in the face of authoritarian censorship.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ahmed Naji, born in Menyet Sandoub, Egypt in 1985, is a writer, journalist, documentary filmmaker and “criminal”. His memoir Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison was a finalist in the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. His novel Using Life (2014), whose English translation by Ben Koerber was shortlisted for the 2018 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, made him the first writer in Egyptian history to be imprisoned for offending public morality. He is the author of three other novels: Rogers (2007), And Tigers to my Room (2020) and Happy Endings (2023). Naji has won several prizes, including a Dubai Press Club Arab Journalism Award and a PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award. He was a City of Asylum Fellow at the Beverley Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas, where he currently lives with his family.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir and Autobiography in the US. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant to translate Haytham El Wardany’s short story collection Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her translation, with Adam Talib, of Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace received a 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation and was shortlisted for the 2017 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translations for the stage have been performed at the Royal Court and the Edinburgh Festival, and short texts have appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, Africa Is a Country, The Common, Asymptote, Arts of the Working Class, World Literature Today, stadtsprachen, Words Without Borders, Exberliner, Newfound, Adda, Critical Muslim, Perpetual Postponement and various anthologies.