Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai and studied in Toronto. Her work has been published in Granta, LitHub, Poetry, BOMB, The Walrus, The Common, The Offing, and more. In 2017, she won the Bronwen Wallace Award for Poetry and in 2019 she won both the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and the DISQUIET Fiction Prize. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. Set in Toronto, this genre-bending work follows an immigrant woman’s romantic relationship with a married man and her ensuing crisis of faith. It won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, as well as the Arab American Book Award, and was listed in the Best Canadian Poetry of 2020 by CBC.
Set in Cairo in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Naga’s debut novel, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English, is a dark romance examining the gaps in North American identity politics, especially when exported overseas. In our globalized twenty-first-century world, this novel exposes the new faces (and races) of empire, asking who profiteers off of failed revolutions and, more importantly, who gets to write of the martyrs? If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and has been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the PEN/ Jean Stein Book Award and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. It was released in April 2022 to rave reviews from Kirkus, Chicago Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, the CBC, and The New York Times, which called it an “exhilarating debut.” Since then it has been translated into Italian, French and Turkish, with Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese on the way.
Naga divides her time between Cairo and Toronto where she teaches.
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Noor Naga 