Abdelrahman ElGendy
- Graduate Student, MFA Nonfiction
Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer, translator, and activist from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A former six-year political prisoner in Egypt, ElGendy writes about counter-narratives, state-manufactured archival silences, and abolishing empathy as an extension of colonial violence.
His writing appears in the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Guernica, AGNI, Mizna, The Markaz Review, Truthout, Protean Magazine, Mada Masr, and elsewhere. A Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award winner, ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck fellow at San Jose State University, a 2022 Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nonfiction Writing MFA, and a Heinz fellow at Pitt's Global Studies Center.
His work has received awards or fellowships from Logan Nonfiction Program, Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Community of Writers Workshop. He is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write Award by the de Groot Foundation, the 2024 Turow-Kinder Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.
You can find his work at his website and on Twitter @El_Gendy_95.