Abdelrahman ElGendy
- Graduate Student, MFA Nonfiction
Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo. He is the author of Huna, a memoir exploring the politics of dissent and erasure through the lens of his six-year political incarceration in Egypt, forthcoming from Hogarth in 2026.
ElGendy's work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, Mizna and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear in Poetry Northwest, LitHub, Words Without Borders, The Margins, and elsewhere. His essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, and Best of the Net.
A Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award winner, ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck fellow at San Jose State University. His work has received awards or fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Heinz Foundation, The Arab American National Museum, Tin House Writers' Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write grant by the de Groot Foundation and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism.
You can find his work on his website and on Twitter @El_Gendy_95.