You Have Not Yet Been Defeated

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.

Arguably the most high profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, Alaa Abd el-Fattah has been in prison for most of the last seven years. You Have Not Yet Been Defeated collects his writings between 2011-2021, many of them smuggled out of his cell.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah is arguably the most high-profile political prisoner in Egypt, if not the Arab world, rising to international prominence during the revolution of 2011. A fiercely independent thinker who fuses politics and technology in powerful prose, an activist whose ideas represent a global generation which has only known struggle against a failing system, a public intellectual with the rare courage to offer personal, painful honesty, Alaa’s written voice came to symbolize much of what was fresh, inspiring and revolutionary about the uprisings that have defined the last decade. Collected here for the first time in English are a selection of his essays, social media posts and interviews from 2011 until the present. He has spent the majority of those years in prison, where many of these pieces were written. Together, they present not only a unique account from the frontline of a decade of global upheaval, but a catalogue of ideas about other futures those upheavals could yet reveal. From theories on technology and history to profound reflections on the meaning of prison, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated is a book about the importance of ideas, whatever their cost.