Overview

Ahmed Naji confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian, utterly self-serious regime.—Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud 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 Cairo's Tora Prison. Rotten Evidence is a record 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 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 is a testament to the power of the creative mind in the face of authoritarian censorship.

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9781917453837

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Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian bilingual writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Author of four novels including Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), and Happy Endings (2023), plus the non-fiction Rotten Evidence. In 2016, he became the first modern Egyptian author imprisoned for literary work, leading to international advocacy until his release and conviction overturned in 2017. His work has been translated into multiple languages and earned him several awards, including the PEN/Barbey Freedom To Write Award. After a fellowship at Black Mountain Institute (2019-2023), Naji now lives in Las Vegas with his family. Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Wales whose translation of Naji's prison memoir Rotten Evidence was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2025 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation with Adam Talib of Raja Alem's The Dove's Necklace received the 2017 Sheikh Hamad Award and was shortlisted for the Banipal Prize. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Haytham El-Wardany's short story collection.

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