Mariam Abdel-Razek

Mariam Abdel-Razek is a British-Egyptian writer and critic based in London. She is excited and fascinated by many and varied things, including but not limited to the acts of eating and drinking, jazz music, etymology, cassette tapes, video games, and the fascimiles of Emily Dickinson. She cares about ephemera, the daily rhythms of life like going to the bagel shop and ordering the same coffee from the man by her tube station, and writing work that is funny and interesting.

Mariam has recently been published in Eaten, Varsity, and in association with the Foundling Museum, London. Her writing for the stage has been performed in London's off-West End, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, and in 2020 she won the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize. Prior to studying at the Royal College of Art, Mariam graduated with a First Class Hons. BA in English from the University of Cambridge. There, she was a member of the Cambridge Footlights and mentored by the Man Booker-nominated and Women's Prize-winning author Ali Smith.

Alongside her writing, she also designs and facilitates scripted programmes in the unlikely field of corporate theatre, with clients including Netflix, Deutsche Bank, and Visa. Her first love is drama, and she has worked as a writer and director on theatre access projects across the UK, Europe, India, and Nepal.

I leverage writing as an attempt — often futile — to make sense of the world I exist in; my experience, my body, and my brain, but also the bodies and brains of people around me.

'When I say something,' Franz Kafka wrote in his diaries, 'it immediately and finally loses its importance … when I write it down it loses it too, but sometimes gains a new one.' In my practice, I want to get my hands all over that thing that is lost when we write — as much as I can — and understand what is gained too. Often, I seek to make work that is funny. Always, I want to make it a deliberate and careful action, like double knotting your shoe laces or cleaning a knife.

A practical critic by nature and education, I am obsessed with form and try to create work that places it in dialogue with content in a way that is satisfying and interesting. I write about small and everyday things because they are what make up life, and because they tend to lead me to bigger things.