Mohamed Samir Nada

Mohamed Samir Nada is an Egyptian novelist born in 1988. He is a representative of the younger generation of Egyptian fiction writers who have emerged in the decade following the 2011 revolution. His fiction engages with contemporary Egyptian society and the psychological lives of his characters with realism and compassion. Nada is the author of several works of short fiction and novels. The Prayer of Anxiety (Salat al-Khawf), his IPAF-winning novel of 2025, is a multi-generational family novel set in contemporary Egypt, tracing the lives of an Egyptian family against the backdrop of social and political change. The novel engages with questions of faith, anxiety, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing society. The novel was praised for the depth of its characterization, its social observation, and its portrayal of the psychological experience of contemporary Egyptians navigating between tradition and modernity. Nada represents the continued vitality of Egyptian fiction, one of the most important traditions in Arabic literature, and his IPAF win brings recognition to a younger generation of Egyptian writers following in the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz and Alaa Al Aswany.