Omar Robert Hamilton

Omar Robert Hamilton

Omar Robert Hamilton is a writer and filmmaker.

His debut novel, The City Always Wins (2017), is a chronicle of the rise and fall of the Egyptian Revolution - a process he has been closely involved with since 2011.

As a filmmaker, he was a member of the Mosireen Media Collective in Cairo, an activist media group that worked to document the revolution from the street level, producing dozens of short documentaries that have been viewed over six million times on the official YouTube channel alone. As a writer, he wrote for Mada Masr, the London Review of Books and the Guardian on ongoing political developments.

Alongside his work in Egypt, he has worked regularly in Palestine since the inception of the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. He works on the festival with a small team of collaborators, and recently co-edited This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature (2017).

Egypt and Palestine make up the twin pillars of his work in narrative fiction also - though always with an emphasis on their positions within the global order. His fiction short, Though I Know the River is Dry (2013) played widely in festivals and was awarded some prizes.

He's twice written on migration in Europe - from Lesvos in 2015, and along the Balkan route in 2017. He has been working since then on a longer narrative project about migration and anti-migration in Europe.