Egyptian author Shady Lewis on the politics of storytelling and his novel, ‘On the Greenwich Line’

Home Books Authors This James Tait Black Prize winner explores bureaucracy, migration and identity through a darkly satirical narrative Published - July 20, 2026 09:41 am IST A view of Little Amal, a puppet symbolising children who have become refugees, in Trafalgar Square, London. | Photo Credit: Getty Images In Egyptian writer Shady Lewis’s On the Greenwich Line (Peirene Press), which won this year’s James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in the U.K., the unnamed narrator finds himself “responsible” for the funeral of a stranger two decades his junior. “Death was going after people half my age, and without any preliminaries at all,” he exclaims. Who is this man? How did he die? And why has the 40-year-old narrator become responsible for his remains?The narrator, who works in an East London housing office, is himself an elusive figure who doesn’t provide any answers to these questions, but instead leaps between stories. This must have been a considerable risk for Lewis to pull off. He weaves an intricate narrative that uses satire to examine deeply serious themes. In this interview, the author discusses the novel — translated from the Arabic by Katharine Halls — and how it appears to foreshadow aspects of reality. Edited excerpts: Born in Cairo, writer and journalist Shady Lewis has lived in London since 2006. Would you say the narrator’s ambiguous voice is driven by the lack of choice and helplessness he experiences after finding himself stuck in a punitive system designed to ostracise? The narrative voice is ambiguous. This is due to his vulnerable position in the system. Nevertheless, he has choices, he resists. He tries to make the funeral happen; he protects the memory of the forgotten lives in the database. His ambiguity is a literary choice. A novel with lots of political themes and assured characters could be off-putting. But he is not preaching; he is humane, hesitant, unclear and sometimes very helpless. How much has your experience working with the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) informed this novel? This novel is a work of fiction; it might be called an auto-fiction, which implies that it has some elements of the author’s real life, but it is still a work of fiction. Having said that, it definitely draws from my everyday experiences (work, friendship, migration, etc). Working in the NHS and with local authorities has been a privilege that has enabled me to see very closely how the welfare state works and fails to work. How matters of life and death can be decided according to managerial calculations, politics, and sometimes, the everyday acts of local bureaucrats. This is too close a distance, and it requires a lot of literary effort to distance myself as a writer from my job and work. Sarcasm, the surreal, the absurd, are all part of this game. Katharine Halls has translated Shady Lewis’s novel ‘On the Greenwich Line’ from Arabic. | Photo Credit: peirenepress.com The novel appears to be about storytelling itself: the way in which the telling can be a tell-all in itself, or whatever it withholds. Would you agree? Indeed, narrating and storytelling are essential themes in the novel. I tried to copy, or to be more precise, mimic classical Arabic storytelling techniques, where stories lead into one another: they go in circles, some hide in bigger ones and then we discover that the little ones are those which really matter. The narrator inherits his grandmother’s storytelling methods, which may explain the way the story is told. The novel tries to explore if we really own our stories. Who can tell them? And who is there to listen? And, more importantly, whose story is more valid? Through stories, we can interpret reality for better or for worse. Stories produce reality, and so does the way we tell them. Given your novel’s engagement with austerity and institutional politics, how did you receive the news of the James Tait Black Prize, handed out by the University of Edinburgh, announced amid an ongoing boycott by staff over job cuts and pay reductions at the university? The novel addresses austerity in the social and healthcare sectors and the issue with the James Tait Black Prize this year is linked to a strike against austerity policies in the university. It saddened us that the university management’s actions overshadowed the news of the prize and we made a statement to support the university staff union. In a way, these events show how relevant and timely the novel themes are. It also shows that literature and literary awards do not operate in a vacuum but have their own economies, which are linked to the wider political economy. Media outlet The New Arab celebrated the news of your win with a post, which attracted this comment: “Shady Lewis is not [an] Egyptian name”. In the novel too, several characters try to arrive at the narrator’s ethnicity — to them, he looks like a Muslim man. It makes one wonder, both in the context of the novel and in real life, how much of one’s identity is determined by others? I actually saw this very comment and it made me smile; it is exactly what happens to the main character in the novel. Identities are social constructs, we inherit them, they are imposed on us by external structures. Some of us have choices, but not all of us; some of us can choose between accepted or permitted identities, others are boxed into a single one all their life. Collectively, we can challenge these structures and reshape them. The interviewer is a non-binary queer writer, essayist, and culture critic. Published - July 20, 2026 09:41 am IST