Mohamed Hashem award winning publisher and author was born in 1958 in Tanta in the Northern Nile Delta, Hashem first worked as a journalist and author of a collection of short stories and a novel, Mala’eb Maftouha [Open Playgrounds], published in 2004. In 2006, he was awarded the Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award by the Association of American Publishers’ International Freedom to Publish Committee (IFTP), and in 2011 he won the Hermann Kesten Prize of the German PEN Club.
Hashem is the owner and managing director of Merit Publishing House, an independent publishing house he established in Cairo in 1998 together with a group of intellectuals led by the late Ibrahim Mansour. Merit is one of the most important literary publishing houses in Egypt which over the years, has changed the contemporary literary scene in Egypt. This was mainly because Hashem supported and encouraged new writers, often being the first to publish them. He has continued to publish works embodying principles of free thought and free expression often leading to censorship, arrests or threats to his own safety.
Hashem was among the first members of the Egyptian Movement for Change, known as Kifaya, or Enough, which emerged in 2004 to oppose the Mubarak regime. He was also instrumental in founding its affiliated movement Writers and Artists for Change.
He participated in the demonstrations that preceded the January Revolution, as well as in the events of the January 25 Revolution, where Merit became a center for activists and demonstrators due to its location in downtown Cairo and proximity to Tahrir Square. Hashem's political activity through Merit resulted in numerous security harassments and book confiscations over the years.
