Taking part in the event along with Saadawi will be Jesús Ruiz Mantilla, a writer and journalist for El País newspaper. Presented by: Karim Hauser, Casa Árabe’s Coordinator of International Relations.

Hadi al-Attag lives in Baghdad. He collects limbs from the dead there after the city is bombed in order to sew them together and create bodies. A lost soul suddenly enters one body and a new being comes to life. This new Frankenstein sets off on a quest to seek vengeance against the people who killed each of the parts of the body which make up his new form. It is a portrait of a city whose inhabitants live in fear of the unknown, isolated and obsessed with the mysterious criminal who has them in his crosshairs.

Presentation information sheet

Ahmed Saadawi (Baghdad, 1973) is an author and screenwriter. In 2010, he was selected as one of the thirty-nine best young Arab writers by Beirut39. In 2014, he became the first Iraqi author to receive the prestigious International Arab Fiction Award for Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013; Libros del Asteroide, 2019), a work for which he also received the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire in 2017, in the foreign novel category, as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. He has authored one volume of poetry, four novels and a set of short stories. He currently lives in Baghdad.

Jesús Ruiz Mantilla is a journalist for the newspaper El País, (the Culture section, Babelia and El País Weekly) and a writer. In his work, he has cultivated fictional stories and essays. He authored the novels Los ojos no ven (Eyes Don’t See); Preludio (Prelude); Yo, Farinelli, el capón (I, Farinelli, the Castrato); Gordo (Fat, which earned him the Sent Soví Award in 2005); Ahogada en llamas (Drowning in Flames) and La cáscara amarga (The Bitter Shell). With Hotel Transición (Transition Hotel) he won the Seventeenth Unicaja Fernando Quiñones Novel Award (2015)