Huna: A Memoir of Revolution, Prison, and Becoming

by Abdelrahman ElGendy

A gripping, deeply moving memoir of survival, education, and resistance by a student protestor–turned–political prisoner in post-revolution Egypt.

“I will never be the same after reading Huna.” —Javier Zamora
“A beautifully written portrait of a radical political awakening.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“The work of a truly liberated writer.” —Fady Joudah

In 2013, seventeen-year-old Abdelrahman ElGendy was a budding student activist in Cairo. Two years after the January 25 revolution, hope for a free Egypt had dissipated; when that summer’s military coup unleashed unprecedented massacres of protesters, Abdelrahman didn’t hesitate—he joined the street movement. His father, fearing for his son’s safety, accompanied him to a mass demonstration. But minutes after they arrived, they were swept up in a brutal police crackdown, and their lives were shattered.

Crushed inside a holding cell, Abdelrahman first heard the words of the Arab world’s most enduring protest song, “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”—We Will Remain Here. He wondered: If no one wanted to remain behind bars, what was the “here” they chose to inhabit?

Abdelrahman would spend the next six years as a political prisoner chasing this Huna, shuffled, alongside his father, from jail cell, to pre-trial detention center, to The Scorpion, Egypt’s most infamous prison complex. As his body broke under the grind of incarceration with no end in sight, he turned to the only refuge left to him: the page. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering while imprisoned, read and wrote voraciously, and, through writing, bore witness.

In his remarkable debut, Abdelrahman offers not a promise of hope, but a provocation. When the very things that can save you—tenderness, family, friendship, language—are used against you, how can you find the courage to love? Huna is a reckoning with what it takes—and what it costs—to remain when erased, and of what endures, perhaps more faithfully, beyond hope.

Genres: Memoir

368 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 1, 2026

About the author

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an author and translator from Cairo. A winner of the Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, he holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Pittsburgh, and his work appears in publications including The Washington Post, The Nation, The Baffler, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. ElGendy’s work has received awards or fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the de Groot Foundation, the Steinbeck Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Arab American National Museum, among others. Huna is his debut memoir.

You can find Abdelrahman at www.abdelrahmanelgendy.com and on Instagram @abdelrahman_elgendy95

Reviews

[Sarah Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This riveting, extraordinary work communicates the literal experience of being a political prisoner within the emotional life of injustice. Abdelrahman's ELGendy brings us closer to the physical suffering,  intellectual hunger, the deep friendships, the modes of survival, the petty brutalities of state players- not only of the regime of Egypt's General Sissi, but of its resonances today in the United States.