Books The ordinary

This is the second edition of the poetry collection *Al-Aadi: Tha’iran wa-Shahidan* (The Ordinary Man: Revolutionary and Martyr) by poet Wael Fathy. The collection was first published in 2018 and won the Ahmed Fouad Negm Award from the Sawiris Foundation for Social Development in 2019.
Critics have celebrated the collection; some have noted that the language employed by Wael Fathy across the fourteen poems written in the colloquial dialect belongs to a category best described as "colloquial in form yet eloquent in meaning and interpretation." The poems engage with the Egyptian and Arab cultural landscape through language charged with the heat of reality—a language that converses with nature and grapples with the violent Egyptian reality. It utilizes a dialectic of opposites—shifting between death and life, speech and silence, drought and rain—to intuitively craft its own myths. Furthermore, the work draws upon religious themes, transforming them into a creative force that reflects the Egyptian understanding of life.

A copy of the poetry collection *The Ordinary Man: Rebel and Martyr*

250 pages.