Promotional Information

We intend to place excerpts from the book in national publications such as the New Yorker and Los Angeles Review of Books and will seek reviews from renowned outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Review of Books and The Nation. Naomi Klein has written a 4000-word preface to the collection which we'll also seek to place. Alaa is currently imprisoned so will not be able to give interviews or events. We feel that this is a book whose audience will grow with time, and that the book's themes will forever remain relevant. In the event of Alaa's release, he would be available for interviews and to discuss his writing.

About the Author

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian writer, technologist and political activist. He is currently being held in indefinite detention in Egypt. He was a central figure in the blogging movement of the early 2000s, a vanguard of free speech and radical discourse that would become one of the catalysts of the 2011 revolution. Committed to using both on-the-ground activism and online platforms to push an uncompromising political discourse, Alaa was 24 when he was first arrested under Hosni Mubarak. Since then he has been prosecuted and arrested by the three other Egyptian regimes of his lifetime. After the coup d'etat of 2013, he was among the principal targets of the counter-revolution and has been held in the regime's prisons since then.

Reviews

'The text you are holding is living history.' - Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything

'Don't read this book to be comforted. Read it to be challenged, terrified, enlightened, moved, and amazed.' - Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

'Fix your own democracy," Abd el-Fattah encourages us, from his cell; Egypt's rulers attempt to isolate, fragment and conceal resistance because it needs a global ecosystem to flourish. What can any one person do with a legacy of pain, struggle and courage? There are no easy solutions here, but You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a heartbreaking, hopeful answer.' - Guardian

'Alaa is the bravest, most critical, most engaged citizen of us all. At a time when Egypt has been turned into a large prison, Alaa has managed to cling to his humanity and be the freest Egyptian.' - Khaled Fahmy, author of All The Pasha's Men

'Alaa is in prison not because he committed a crime, not because he said too much, but because his very existence poses a threat to the state. Those who are bold, those who do not relent, will always threaten the terrified and ultimately weak state which must, to survive, squash its opponents like flies. But Alaa will not allow himself to be crushed like that, I know.' - Jillian C. York, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

'Alaa is a philosopher of everyday life and life-long struggle; he doesn't merely find meaning in that which we go through, especially in dark political moments, but creates meaning and gives it form in writing. And he does so from a highly entrenched and implicated place in the present. His thoughts know no frontiers; they pierce through local contexts to inspire new modes of thinking about the chaotic substance of politics.' - Lina Attalah, editor in chief of Mada Masr