A pygmalion makes clay figurines that become people of flesh and blood; a Robinson Crusoe that, sailing on a ship, arrives at an unknown island; a Havy, the son of the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufayl’s guard, completely alone in the wilderness of an island asks himself existential questions. From them is born, literary, Abdulatif’s sculptor, who puts on the table current questions about culture and the revolutions of the Arab Spring through the biblical history of the Creation of the World.
A work without precedent in the Arab narrative that represents the religious and political conflicts of the contemporary Arab World, in particular of the postrevolutionary Egypt, where there were born great dreams that ended up turned into nightmares. A pioneer novel in the dystopian genre, full of stories that are born from one another, because to storytell is to build the memory.
This work won the Best Novel Award of the prestigious Sawiris Foundation for Social Development in 2015.
Written by Ahmad Abdulatif
Translation by Rafael Ortega Rodrigo and Laura Salguero Esteban
Cover by Diego Caballero
Collection: Baobab Books
Size: 14.50 x 21.50cm
Pages: 216
Binding: rustic with flaps
ISBN: 978.84.127565.1.7
P.V.P. €18,95 (price without VAT €18,23)
Ahmad Abdulatif
(El Cairo, 1978). Philologist and translator to Arabic of authors such as Cortázar, Borges, García Márquez or Saramago, Abdulatif is considered one of the founders of the Egypt New Novel. He has published seven novels and a book of short stories, and he has been honored with numerous prestigious awards. Abdulatif’s work is characterized by the mixture of reality, fantasy and dreams, and it is inspired by the medieval Arab imaginary and by the Latin American literature of the 20th century. The Powder Fortress has been translated into Spanish (Red Libre Ediciones, 2019).
