Season of Migration to Arkadia

This short story about the every-day life of working class people in Cairo is the title story from the short collection "Season of Migration to Arkadia" by the Egyptian writer Muhammad Aladdin. It is regarded as one of the five best literary works about the Egyptian revolution, translated by Humphrey Davies.

Hamzah, a car mechanic in Cairo, sets his eyes on a beautiful leather jacket. In the turmoil of the demonstrations around Tahrir Square, he goes onto a quest into the big shopping mall Arkadia.



Muhammad Aladdin is a noted Egyptian novelist and was born in Cairo in 1979. He was chosen as one of the most important Egyptian writers in the new millennium by the Egyptian weekly Akhbar Al-Adab (News of Literature) in 2011, and as one of the “Six Egyptian writers you don’t know but you should“ by the writer Pauls Toutonghi in The Millions. He has written several novels and collections of fiction. He lives in between Cairo and Berlin dedicating his full time for writing. In 2017 he was awarded the Egyptian literary award The Sawiris Prize. He was kidnapped by Sissi’s regime in 2019 for political reasons and has been released after 8 days without facing any charges.



Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of more than twenty works of modern Arabic literature, among them five of the novels of Elias Khoury. He has also edited and translated older works, including Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s seminal mid-nineteenth-century Leg Over Leg (Library of Arabic Literature, NYU Press, 2013-2014). He lives in Cairo.



This short story about the every-day life of working class people in Cairo is the title story from the short collection "Season of Migration to Arkadia" by the Egyptian writer Muhammad Aladdin. It is regarded as one of the five best literary works about the Egyptian revolution, translated by Humphrey Davies.

Hamzah, a car mechanic in Cairo, ...