In February 2016, Ahmed Naji was sentenced to two years in prison for “violating public decency,” after an excerpt of his novel Using Life reportedly caused a reader to experience heart palpitations. Naji ultimately served ten months of that sentence, in a group cellblock in Cairo’s Tora Prison.
Rotten Evidence is a chronicle of those months. Through Naji’s writing, the world of Egyptian prison comes into vivid focus, with its cigarette-based economy, homemade chess sets, and well-groomed fixers. Naji’s storytelling is lively and uncompromising, filled with rare insights into both the mundane and grand questions he confronts.
How does one secure a steady supply of fresh vegetables without refrigeration? How does one write and revise a novel in a single notebook? Fight boredom? Build a clothes hanger? Negotiate with the chief of intelligence? And, most crucially, how does one make sense of a senseless oppression: finding oneself in prison for the act of writing fiction? Genuine and defiant, this book stands as a testament to the power of the creative mind, in the face of authoritarian censorship.
“Ahmed Naji confronts what happens when one’s fundamentally unserious, oversexed youth dovetails with an authoritarian, utterly self-serious regime.” —Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud
“A powerful account of an artist plunged into a Kafkaesque encounter with state censorship, Rotten Evidence is a vivid, biting, witty account of Naji’s time in prison for his novel, paying an incredible price for an art form to which he hadn’t even yet fully devoted himself. It is the story of the birth of a writer in the truest sense. Naji’s imprisonment for writing led him to ask: What is writing worth? What is the written word capable of? Rotten Evidence is the triumphant answer to those enormous, essential questions.” —Jordan Kisner, author of Thin Places: Essays from In Between
Finalist for NBCC 2024
Praise for Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison
“In lucid prose undergirded by righteous anger, [Naji] delivers a moving testament to the power of free expression. It’s tough to forget.” —Publishers Weekly
“There’s a quality to Egyptian bureaucracy that is so senseless, it’s difficult to translate to the page. But this memoir does just that. Rotten Evidence describes in a cool, clipped tone, utterly devoid of self-pride or self-pity, what happens to the psyche when it is caught in the machinery of the Egyptian justice system. A tragicomedy stripped down to its last nerve.” —Noor Naga, author of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English
“When Naji quotes at length from the judgment against him—a florid, self-important, flagrantly wrongheaded argument for censoring books on behalf of public morality—it doesn’t sound much different from a Moms 4 Liberty press conference. […] If Rotten Evidence offers an abiding takeaway image, it’s of the writer in his prison bunk, hunched over a notebook cradled on his ‘makeshift desk of leg bones,’ attempting to transmute his squalor into art. Entering prison, Naji wasn’t sure he was a real writer. Question answered.” —Desert Companion
“If excerpts from Ahmed Naji’s extraordinary novel, Using Life, were used as evidence to convict and imprison him, how could he continue to practice writing inside his Egyptian prison? This new book presents a remarkable deviation from conventional prison narratives and themes. Here, a small prison library is the hero, a place where readers—convicts and jailers alike—love fiction and discuss imagination, amid systematic violence. Rotten Evidence navigates multiple genres to tell us about history, books, talismans of power, social classes, multiplicity of desires, wicked destinies, and bonds of friendship that develop in a prison.” —Iman Mersal, author of The Threshold
““A top-tier work of prison literature.”” —Foreword Reviews, starred review
“VERDICT A well-written and thoroughly absorbing memoir. Naji gives readers an understanding of the Egyptian justice system and the risks taken by anyone who might challenge it, even inadvertently.” — Library Journal
@Sophy Hollington
Ahmed Naji
Author of Four novels, Rogers (2007), Using Life (2014), And Tigers to my Room (2020), Happy Endings (2023) and another non-fiction book (Rotten Evidence: Reading and Writing in Prison) as well as numerous blogs and other articles. His work has been translated into different languages, including English, Italian, Spanish, and others
Ahmed was born in Menyet Sandoub, Mansoura,Egypt 1985. He started working as culture journalist in 2003.
In 2016 Ahmed was sentenced for 2 years in an Egyptian prison after a reader complained that an excerpt from his novel (Using Life) published in a literary journal harmed public morality. His imprisonment marks the first time in modern Egypt that an author has been jailed for a work of literature. Writers and literary organizations around the world rallied to support Naji, and he was released in December 2016. His original conviction was overturned in May 2017.
Through his carers, he won several prizes including; Dubai Press Club Arab Journalism Award, United Arab Emirates, 2012 for best culture article, PEN/Barbey Freedom To Write Award, USA, 2016.
She was sucking my dick when suddenly she stopped to ask if I had given grandmother her medicine. I looked at her then laying my head back, my waist forward, extending my dick into her mouth, I said: “Yeah, five drops in half a cup of water.” She smiled, sucking once again, then suddenly lifting… Read more
This interview was first published at: https://pen.org/ahmed-naji-pen-ten-interview/ By: Lily Philpott May 2, 2019 The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week Lily Philpott, Public Programs Manager at PEN America, speaks with Ahmed Naji, 2016 PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award recipient and the author of three books: Rogers (2007), Seven Lessons Learned from Ahmed… Read more
This conversation was first published: https://electricliterature.com/imprisoned-in-egypt-for-his-writing-ahmed-naji-is-finally-free/ No one foresaw that Ahmed Naji would be imprisoned for his novel. After all, no author had ever been subjected to arrest for morality reasons in modern Egypt, and as Naji himself says in this interview: “My writings are not political.” The novel in question, Using Life (illustrated by Ayman Al… Read more
This article was published first at: https://thenewinquiry.com/using-life-instructions-for-play/ – Today marks a “Day of Blogging” for Egyptian novelist Ahmed Naji, who is serving two years in prison: guilty of having written the playful, language-rich, genre-crossing novel Using Life, he will be given the PEN/Barbey Freedom to Write Award, today, in absentia, in New York City. When Naji was charged… Read more
The Plant I will not come through the door or the window, but as a plant you cannot notice with your naked eye. I will grow day after day, to the sound of your singing and the rhythm of your breath at night. A small plant you will not notice at first, growing beneath your bed.… Read more
1 Our family has a long history of disposing of books in various ways. As a boy in Egypt, I remember the regular routine when, every so often, my father would open the cupboards and drawers and arrange his books, magazines, and notebooks. Most dear to him were the notebooks which contained his commentary and… Read more
