Shady Lewis declines Sawiris best novel award

Teneleven writer Shady Lewis this week declined the 2022 Sawiris Cultural Award for best book by an established writer, awarded to his novel A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (Dar Elain, 2021). The Sawiris Cultural Awards are granted across a range of categories within the arts by the Sawiris Foundation, which is endowed by one of Egypt’s wealthiest business families. Teneleven writers Haytham El-Wardany and Mohammad Rabie have also won previous editions of the prizes. Lewis made the announcement, which has been reported by various Egyptian news outlets, on his Facebook page.

Lewis, born 1978, is an Egyptian novelist and journalist whose writing engages with the social history of Coptic Christians and trajectories of migration from Egypt to the West. He has published three novels to date, beginning with The Lord’s Ways (2018). His second novel, On The Greenwich Line (2019), is forthcoming in French from Actes Sud in March 2023 and in German from Hoffmann und Campe in June 2023. The prizewinning novel, A Brief History of Genesis and Eastern Cairo (Dar Elain, 2021) unfolds during a breathless few hours of armed confrontation between security forces and Islamists, and is based on real events which took place in Cairo in 1989.

World rights to Shady Lewis’s work are available from teneleven, with samples available on request.

09/01/2023 by katia