“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
About Me
Sherine Elbanhawy has an MA in Islamic Studies with a specialization in Women and Gender Studies from McGill University. She holds a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. She’s the founder of Rowayat, a literary magazine showcasing SWANA writers and their diasporas. Her writing has been published in The Malahat Review, Room Magazine, Arablit and others. She loves to travel, read and spend time with family, and friends. She’s AIM’s board member and secretary, tweets @CaireneGirl
Founder of Rowayat
Rowayat روايات (transliterated riwayat, rewayat) is the popular plural word in Arabic for novels. However, we chose this name to reflect all types of creative writing and storytelling.
Rowayat launched in 2012 as a literary journal emerging from Egypt, publishing fiction, poetry, drama, and a range of works. We also publish a children’s issue, Rowayat Gemeza for young readers and writers, and a French issue, Édition spéciale de Rowayat en français. Since 2015, our focus has been Rowayat’s publishing arm, which has published over ten books. We’ve also recently relaunched Rowayat as a global, primarily online platform, featuring all the pieces from our previously printed issues, with new issues every three months.
Rowayat believes in building community through storytelling in all its forms, enabling multiple voices to be heard to counter the era of injustice we now live in, ever so dominated by corpocracy, securitization, and military expansionism. Under this repressive reality, we choose writing as our means of resistance, inspired by feminists of colour who paved the way for feminist transnational solidarity through love, joy, and acceptance.
Cairo has long been Rowayat ’s home, and its idea was born out of the 2011 revolution. While achieving the political dreams of the time might seem elusive, we have never lost faith in the power of storytelling and how the written word continues to keep communities and minds engaged.
Like the bennu in our logo, which rises again and flies to new homes, we chose to pursue our mission from a new destination and moved Rowayat to Montreal, Canada, in 2022. Our focus remains on hybrid voices, and while we accept writer submissions from a range of backgrounds, we primarily publish Egyptian and SWANA writers, as well as writers with submissions of relevance to SWANA experiences and from the Global South.
Alliance of Inclusive Muslims
AIM achieves their goal by representing member organizations and amplifying their voices at the global stage such as the United Nations both in New York and in Geneva, the European Union, and by securing funding for members, capacity building, and administering and implementing approved programming by member organizations globally.
The literary scene is dynamic!
It’s growing, it’s rich and free. Imagination has no limits. On paper, there is no regard for social constraints – freedoms are absolute.
