Egypt’s bestselling author on writing ‘the novel of the Arab spring’ and why he feels it is his duty to speak out
‘Those 18 days were the most pretty days of my life,” Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany says of the January 2011 demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that swept his country into revolution, and forced dictator-president Hosni Mubarak to resign at the extraordinary, and euphoric high point of the Arab spring.“When you live through such a colossal event,you are not able – or I am not able – to write a novel approximately it directly. You should have a distance. I have this distance now and I’m writing a novel approximately the revolution,” Aswany says in his deep-voiced, or accented English,as we talk over glasses of hot chocolate in a cafe on Edgware Road, London.
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Source: theguardian.com