Free

Location: room 7000, SFU Harbour Centre.

Co-sponsored by SFU's Institute for the Humanities, International Studies, CCSMSC, World Literature Program, Contemporary Arts Graduate Program, and the Institute for Performance Studies.

Sonallah Ibrahim is one of the most iconic of Egypt's dissident novelists. Now aged 78, Ibrahim is known for his confrontation of the various regimes that ruled his country over the past five decades. The author of such celebrated and acclaimed works as Stealth, The Committee, and Zaat, Ibrahim has been harassed by authorities for his unrepentant critique of power. He was jailed for 5 years under Egyptian President Nasser for his journalistic writings and Marxist affiliations. Upon his release in 1964, he wrote his first novel That Smell which was banned in Egypt for twenty years. Until recently, his most famous book The Committee, which was written in 1981 and published in Lebanon to avoid the censors, is an epic satirization of Egyptian President Sadat's aggressive privatization policies. In a public ceremony in 2003, Ibrahim refused to accept a lifetime award--his country's highest cultural accolade--in protest against the Mubarak regime. In recent years, Ibrahim has been vocal in his support of the January 25 revolution against the Mubarak regime and endorsed the protests that led to the removal of former president Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sonallah Ibrahim, who the The New Yorker called "the ocular novelist" writes in a style often considered a departure from the orthodox Arabic literary practice. His writings are known for their incisive social criticism, realism, and dark humour.