There is an inescapable order, a commandment from which we are unable to escape: writing down your memories and copying your ancestors’ to hand them down to future generations. To avoid forgetting the past. To remember who we are are where we come from. This is the history of a Moorish family that rebelled when they lost what is any human being’s most sacred possession: their identity. Words, an antidote against oblivion, become their most powerful weapon in this chaotic world, in a history whose fate is sure to be repeated.

Presentation information sheet 

Ahmad Abdulatif (Cairo, 1978) studied Hispanic Philology at Al-Azhar University, having graduated in the year 2000. He then continued his studies in Spain, where he completed a Master’s degree in Contemporary Arab and Islamic Studies at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Considered one of the founders of the new Egyptian novel, he has also translated many different works of Spanish and Latin American literature into Arabic. His first novel, The Key Maker, won the National Novel Award in 2011. His later novels were The World in a Cup (2012), The Sculptor’s Book (2013), a novel which deals with one of the Arab world’s great problems, religious fanaticism, earning him the Sawiris Cultural Award for 2015. Elias (2014) is considered by critics to be a novel which “founded a new eloquence in Arab literature.” The The Fortress of Dust (2017) is a novel which became a finalist on the shortlist for the prestigious Arab Narrative Award bestowed by the United Arab Emirates.

RELEE (Red Libre Ediciones) is an independent publishing firm that was founded in 2015. Its “Maktaba” collection was created in order to provide the Spanish public with access to a generation of authors with which they are completely unfamiliar, belonging to literature from a part of the world rarely translated into our language. Modern but acclaimed authors from today’s Arab world, they are young but have a significant track record behind them, as they continue to forge the Arabic language literature of our current era.