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.
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection, Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio. In this… Read more
During the 1921 obscenity trial involving James Joyce’s Ulysses, a dispute broke out between the prosecuting attorney and the defense team in the New York courthouse. The assistant district attorney angrily announced he was going to read an extract from the novel out loud to establish before the court that it posed a threat to… Read more
Ahmed Naji is a collector of occupational labels—occasional journalist, blogger, intellectual masturbator, documentary filmmaker, agent for belly dancers—accepting any label, and prescribing to none. The one that feels most true is simply “writer.” For Naji, to be a writer is not an identity in itself, but an avenue for discovery: “Writing itself is a way… Read more
A ravishing tale about a time when political and social world orders have been turned on their heads. It gives us great pleasure to present this proposal for a flagship museum commemorating the history of white people as part of an initiative to recognise and celebrate the ethnic and cultural diversity of Gharbiyya Governorate, Egypt.… Read more
Ahmed Naji: I was in denial. Until I was in the police station I was in denial, and I thought this should be a mistake and something’s wrong. Because as I was telling you, this was the first time that happened in the history of Egypt. The reaction was so big. It was more than… Read more
Ten years after Egyptians rose up against long-ruling dictator Hosni Mubarak during the first hopeful weeks of the Arab Spring, we look at why it didn’t work out as the protesters might have hoped and ask if the energy of Egypt’s revolution is still alive anywhere. Andrew Mueller is joined by Nancy Okail, Ahmed Naji… Read more
