Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A former six-year political prisoner in Egypt between 2013 and 2020, Abdelrahman writes about counter-narratives, state-manufactured archival silences, and abolishing empathy as an extension of colonial violence.

 

Arrested at 17 and released at 24, he started and earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering from Ain Shams University while in prison.  

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Abdelrahman's work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, AGNI, Mizna, The Markaz Review and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations appear or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Margins, Protean Magazine, Cultural Anthropology, Mada Masr, Al-Manassa, and elsewhere.

 

A Samir Kassir Freedom of Press Award winner, Abdelrahman is a 2024-25 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University. He was a 2022-23 Dietrich fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Nonfiction Writing MFA, and a 2022—2024 Heinz fellow at Pitt's Global Studies Center. His work has received awards or fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Arab American National Museum, Tin House Writers' Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. He is the winner of the 2024 Courage to Write grant by the de Groot Foundation, and was a finalist for the 2021 and 2023 Margolis Award for Social Justice Journalism. ​

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He is represented by Jin Auh of the Wylie Agency.