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.
حينما خرجتُ من السجن، بعد عام قضيته بعيداً من شوارع القاهرة، كان أول ما لاحظته، إلى جانب كثافة سُحب الإكتئاب والإحباط على وجوه سكان المدينة، هو تلك الزيادة في عدد النساء والفتيات العاملات، بل ظهورهن بكثافة ندر وجودهن فيها في القاهرة. ظننت أن الأمر شخصي وأني بسبب البقاء في السجن لشهور طويلة، بلا تواصل مع… Read more
بمناسبة اقتراب عيد ميلاده الأربعين، نعيد نشر حوار أجراه أحمد ناجى وأحمد وائل مع أمير الرواية الذهنية والدراما الهزلية نائل الطوخى. أجرى هذا الحوار منذ عشر أعوام حينما بلغ نائل الثلاثين، على أمل أن نصدر جزء ثانى منه بمناسبة عيد ميلاده الأربعين. ولا يفوتنا أن نهنئ نائل الحبيب بروايته الأخيرة التى يخرج فيها من البلاعة،… Read more
لم يكن مُهمًا لي أن أعرف إلى أين نتجه، لكن بسهولة كنتُ أرى أننا نتجه نحو ميدان السيدة عائشة، وهو ما جعلني أحاول أن أتذكر أي مطعم باسم “الزهور”، هامّ ومثير لدرجة أن يدعوني أنور وليلي، ليس إلى تناول الغذاء فيه معهما، بل وتخصيص نصف يوم كامل للاستمتاع بنزهة جميلة – كان هذا هو التعبير… Read more
قضت محكمة استئناف شمال القاهرة اليوم بعدم اختصاصها في نظر الدعوى المقامة ضد الفقير لله أحمد ناجى بتهمة خدش الحياء العام بسبب نشر فصل من رواية #استخدام_الحياة في جريدة أخبار الأدب. و بإحالة الدعوى لمحكمة الجنايات. يعنى هذا جولة جديدة من المحاكمات لكن هذه المرة أمام محكمة الجنايات. أدين بالشكر للأساتذة ناصر أمين الذى قدم اليوم مرافعة… Read more
Was published first in: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/01/after-the-revolution-2/ Iwas in a classroom in Turkey recently, explaining the word utopia. From u and topos: “no-place,” possibly a pun on eu-topos, “good place.” See also: dystopia. That, too, is a place that doesn’t exist, but— “Oh,” someone interrupted, “it exists.” My students were Syrian refugees, and they were taking no lessons on where the border lay between the real and… Read more
Published first on: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-new-fiction-1513970981 In 2015,shortly after Ahmed Naji published his novel “Using Life” (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 196 pages, $21.95), a sexually explicit dystopian fantasy that imagines the destruction of Cairo under a tsunami of sand, an elderly reader wrote the authorities to complain that the book had caused him… Read more
