Ra’ouf Mus'ad (sometimes known as Raouf Moussad-Basta) is a playwright, journalist and novelist who was born in Sudan to Coptic parents from Egypt. He moved to Egypt as a teenager and lived in various countries, both in the Middle East and in Europe, during the past 30 years. He has now settled in Amsterdam with his Dutch wife and their children and has taken Dutch nationality. Biography He comes from a Coptic Christian background. Although his father's family was Coptic, the father was converted to Protestantism and became a Protestant minister. This religious, and more specifically Christian, background is an important part of the struggle with identity and belonging which becomes apparent in much of Mus'ad’s writing. He was born in Port Sudan, an Eastern Port on the Red Sea, in 1937 and lived the first years of his life there, before moving with his family to Wad Madani, to the south east of Khartoum on the Blue Nile. From here he was sent to boarding school in Asyut in Middle Egypt, from where he returned to Wad Madani for the summer holidays before his father’s work prompted the family to finally relocate to Luxor-Egypt. He studied journalism at the University of Cairo and graduated in 1960. It was in Cairo in 1954 that he first joined a small underground Marxist organisation initially called ‘The Vanguard of the Workers and Fellaheen’ and then later renamed ‘The Party of the Workers and Fellaheen’. In Cairo, the family moved around various areas, including al-Fajjala and Deir al-Malaak, in increasing poverty because his father had fallen seriously ill and could no longer work. In Nasser's Egypt, Communist organisations were illegal and political activity was a dangerous pursuit punished with imprisonment. During the Suez Crisis of 1956 Mus'ad was arrested whilst handing out leaflets urging popular resistance to the foreign occupation of the Suez Canal Zone. He and his comrades were held for one night and then released. In December 1960 he was again arrested at the family flat in Deir al-Malaak after a naïve attempt to escape and disappear. He was held for seven months before being brought before a military court in Alexandria and sentenced for Years imprisonment. He spent another seven or eight months in custody in Alexandria before being moved to the oases prisons where he stayed until the mass releases of 1964. It was in prison that he met