Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The City Always Wins | 2017 | Buy |
Omar Robert Hamilton is an Egyptian-British writer and filmmaker born in London in 1984. After studying English at Oxford, he made several short films and co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual event held in cities across Palestine. When the Egyptian revolution broke out in 2011, he moved to Cairo and helped establish the Mosireen media collective, a group of filmmakers who documented the uprising through dozens of short documentaries that reached millions of viewers online.
His debut novel, The City Always Wins (2017), draws directly on those years in Cairo. The book captures the intensity of the revolution, from the euphoria of mass protests in Tahrir Square to the silence of morgues and the slow grinding down of hope as the military reasserted control. It won the Betty Trask Award and the Prix de Litterature Arabe, and the Boston Globe named it a Book of the Year.
Hamilton has also written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Mada Masr, and Guernica. His short film Though I Know the River is Dry, shot in Palestine and starring Kais Nashef, won the Prix UIP at Rotterdam and was nominated for Best Short at the European Film Awards.