Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha tenderly captures Cairoan language and identity, a tingling embrace of Arabic and English nested in his essays, poems and novels. In his first novel The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars (2015) Youssef explores a new side of the Arabic language, delving into postmodern notions of the caliphate, Cairo and the history of Arabic literature. Fully submerging himself into cultural waters, Youssef is not only a writer but a photographer, journalist, literary critic, and cultural editor as well. His most recent novel, The Dissenters (2025), spans seventy years of history and follows a boy’s visions of his mother throughout her ever-changing life as an Egyptian woman.