YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN DEFEATED

Collecting and translating the work of the radical theorist, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, for the first time in English, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated shot to instant international relevance when Alaa began a hunger strike from his prison cell in Egypt. His powerful writings on democracy, economics and technology – many smuggled out of prison – connected with audiences worldwide and rallied cultural figures, labour unions, climate activists, Nobel laureates and political leaders to the call for his freedom. Though Alaa is still in prison today his book, his vision for our world in crisis, reverberates.

With a Foreword by
Naomi Klein

Winner:
PEN Canada One Humanity Award;
Vaclav Havel Center Disturbing the Peace Award;
Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award

 

SPECIAL, LIMITED EDITION AVAILABLE NOW

The First Decade Collection is a limited edition series of ten hardbacks celebrating Fitzcarraldo Editions’ publishing over the first ten years. With a run of 1000 copies, each book is casebound in fine linen cloth and numbered book plates, a belly band and custom marbled endpapers.

 

PRAISE FOR YOU HAVE NOT YET BEEN DEFEATED

‘Don’t read this book to be comforted. Read it to be challenged, terrified, enlightened, moved, and amazed.’
— Kamila Shamsie


‘The text you are holding is living history. ... It must be read for the precision of its language, for its bold experimentations with form and style, and for the endlessly original ways its author finds to express disdain for tyrants, liars and cowards. Most of all, it must be read for what Alaa has to tell us about revolutions – why most fail, what it feels like when they do, and, perhaps, how they might still succeed.’
– Naomi Klein

‘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 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

‘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.’
– Jillian C. York, director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation