CO-WINNER OF THE 2022 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE
This gritty t
ale of two
men’s
ill-conceived quest for a better life via the deserts of the Middle East
and
the cities of Europe is pure storytelling
Two Bedouin men from Egypt’s Western Desert seek to escape poverty through different routes. One—the intellectual, terminally self-doubting, and avowedly autobiographical Hamdi—gets no further than southern Libya’s fly-blown oasis of Sabha, while his cousin—the dashing, irrepressible Phantom Raider—makes it to the fleshpots of Milan.
The backdrop of this darkly comic and unsentimental story of illegal immigration is a brutal Europe and Muammar Gaddafi’s rickety, rhetoric-propped Great State of the Masses, where “the Leader” fantasizes of welding Libyan and Egyptian Bedouin into a new self-serving political force, the Saad-Shin.
Compelling and visceral, with a seductive, muscular irony,
The Men Who Swallowed the Sun is an unforgettable novel of two men and their fellow migrants and the extreme marginalization that drives them.
About the author
Humphrey Davies (194–2021) was an award-winning literary translator of Arabic into English. He received a first class honors degree in Arabic at Cambridge University and holds a doctorate in Near East Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He won and was hortlisted for numerous literary prizes, and was twice awarded the prestigious Saif Ghobash–Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He translated Naguib Mahfouz, Elias Khoury, Mourid Barghouti, Alaa Al-Aswany, and Bahaa Taher, among others.
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