Born, raised and based in Cairo, Youssef Rakha is a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, journalist, photographer. He's been at the cutting edge of contemporary Arabic writing since 2005. More recently he has turned to English, his other "native" tongue, in the hope of bringing post-millennial Cairo into the larger conversation.
A graduate of Hull University, England, Youssef juggles his writing with various responsibilities at the Cairo-based English-language Al-Ahram Weekly and edits The Sultan's Seal at yrakha.com. He has been translated into Italian, Spanish, French, German, Polish and Slovak. He was among the 39 best Arab writers under 40 selected for the Hay Festival Beirut39 Festival in 2010, and his first novel, The Book of the Sultan's Seal, won the 2015 Banipal Seif Ghobash Prize for Paul Starkey's translation.
