El-Habs (The Imprisonment), by Mohamed Sayed Abdel-Rehim, Cairo: GOCP, 2013

Egyptian General Organization of Cultural Palaces (GOCP) has just released a short story collection called El-Habs (The Imprisonment), by the young writer Mohamed Sayed Abdel-Rehim, which won him first place at the central literary competition of the GOCP last week.

The collection tackles the idea of imprisonment, in its corporal and non-corporal forms. The temporal range of the collection swings between the Mamluk era in Egypt (1250–1517), and the present time.

Abdel-Rehim, writer and translator, works as an editor and translator at Egypt’s official news agency MENA. He released his first collection in 2009 entitled Al-Khouf Min Wamda (The Fear of Glimpse).