HAYTHAM EL-WARDANY—NOTES FROM THE MARSHES
Translated by Wiam el-Tamimi and Yasmin Zohdi
Published October 2026
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“After the genocide, language must become a means for striking fascism and overcoming property relations.”
Haytham el-Wardany is one of the most compelling writers of our moment. Following The Book of Sleep (2021) and the recent pamphlets Gaza 2035 (2025) and The Difficulties (2025), Notes from the Marshes contains two prose texts and a sequence of poems. In the title sequence, written in English, verses from Refaat Alareer are read amidst military bases in Cyprus, turtles lay their eggs in an alley, a sister asks: “What is fascism?” Alongside these stanzas are two prose texts, translated from Arabic. ‘What if the word we’ ask questions about the possibility of collective voicing, when “the grammar of revolution” is “cut by the syntax of the state”. In ‘Needle in the Eye’, the author walks with a severed hand in their pocket down a Kreuzberg street, seeking for the language beneath the rubble of Gaza, for the wounded vowels and wounded words among the bodies; for a way to keep communion with the dead intact. Notes from the Marshes asks: Where now?
A5, perfect-bound, colour covers, 64 pages.
HAYTHAM EL-WARDANY is an Egyptian writer and translator. He lives and works in Berlin, and writes short stories and experimental prose. His praxis focuses on fiction, especially short stories, and nonfiction formats, like essays, and fragmental prose.
WIAM EL-TAMIMI is an Egyptian writer, literary translator, and editor whose work has been featured in publications such as The Paris Review, Granta, AGNI, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, Literary Hub, ArabLit, and The Common. She is an editor-at-large at The Avery Review, and is currently writing a nonfiction book.
YASMIN ZOHDI is a writer, translator and film critic based in Cairo, Egypt. She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, New York. A former culture editor at the independent news website Mada Masr and an alumna of Berlinale Talent Press, Zohdi is interested in the intersections between literary and cinematic forms, and how they continue to inform one another.
“Haytham’s exceptional prose and remarkable originality make him one of literature’s most distinctive voices today. Across fiction, creative nonfiction, and experimental writing, he unsettles genre boundaries and reinvents storytelling with each new work.”
—Iman Mersal, author of The Threshold and Traces of Enayat
“I think the greatest writer I have met, quite frankly, is the Egyptian modern writer Haytham el-Wardany.”
—Siddhartha Lokanandi, Wasafiri
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