Siraj

Author's name: Radwa Ashour

The novel is based on a game, as I depict an imaginary place, and in the background of the imaginary place I see an actual history, and I create a relationship between the two places. In the imaginary place there is an island that I imagine somewhere between the coast of Zanzibar and Yemen, and the time is in the last third of the 19th century, and in part of the novel there are the events of the bombing of Alexandria, which is real. Through the two imaginary and historical places, I wanted to write a story whose variations we still live through to this day, placing the people trapped between the hammer of invaders and the anvil of tyrannical rulers. It is an attempt to get closer to the old story and to liberate themselves, in one way or another, from the form of the novel.