Archives: April 2021

YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN DEFEATED by Alaa Abd el-Fattah

photo credit: Nariman el-Mofty

Fitzcarraldo Editions will publish Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s You Have Not Yet Been Defeated in the UK on 20 October 2021.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah, 39, is arguably the most high profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world. A leading
figure among the young technologists and bloggers of the 2000s he rose to international prominence during the
revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade.

Alaa has been in prison for most of the last seven years and many of the pieces collected here were smuggled out of his cell. From theses on technology, to theories of history, to painful reflections on the meaning of prison, his voice in thesepages – arranged by family and friends – cuts as sharply relevant, as dangerous, as ever.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian writer, technologist and political activist. He is currently being held in indefinite
detention in Egypt. He was a central figure in the blogging movement of the early 2000s, a vanguard of free speech and radical discourse that would become one of the catalysts of the 2011 revolution. Committed to using both on-the-ground activism and online platforms to push an uncompromising political discourse, Alaa was 24 when he was first arrested under Hosni Mubarak. Since then he has been prosecuted and arrested by the three other Egyptian regimes of his lifetime. After the coup d’etat of 2013, he was among the principal targets of the counter-revolution and has been held in the regime’s prisons since then.

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