Egyptian author Shady Lewis on the politics of storytelling and his novel, ‘On the Greenwich Line’
Egyptian author Shady Lewis discusses his award-winning novel 'On the Greenwich Line,' which explores themes of displacement and the U.K. immigration system. The interview delves into the narrator's ambiguous voice and how the author's personal experiences in London influenced the narrative.
Why it matters
The work offers a critical perspective on the immigrant experience and the bureaucratic challenges faced by individuals within foreign social systems.
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?
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