Viral

Our Birthday celebrations are still on for the month, but we’ve gone viral.

We (I) are also celebrating the anniversary of my semi-retirement from full-time teaching. It all started in the month of April many years ago, when I had an email from a publisher who wanted to publish one of my books. By the July of the same year, I had written another which they also wanted to publish.

At the same time, I had reached The World Number 1 ranking as an author through other publications. My current full-time teaching contract with the university had one month left on it, and I had decided by then that perhaps there is no need to renew.

Many years later, I have managed to achieve independence with more than sixty books to my name as well as many other papers and articles and chapters in journals, magazines and newspapers.

This month we (I) have also launched a youtube channel, many of the videos have gone viral almost instantaneously.

You can watch, like and subscribe here https://www.youtube.com/@HBastawy

We (I) are still new on social media, you can find us on all main social media platforms here. Follow us to keep up with what we are doing.

I own Everything


It is true. I now own all the rights to all my books.

This is something that I had envisaged many years ago. Being tied to several publishers through various contracts was problematic and imposed hurdles on my creativity. Whilst I am grateful to the publishers who did business with me, the editorial process has been very mechanical and uncreative.

I encountered this problem with various editors, across many of my publications. At some points the editors did not understand the point of the multilingualism in my poetry, at other points they did not see the need for the new words I was introducing. Some of these new words are now in various English dictionaries.

I gained some of the rights to some of my work a few years ago, and with that I started going through them and adding what was subtracted by the mechanical editors who did not understand the spirit of my work. Sometimes these were some words, at other times these were whole sections if not chapters.

Now I have finally gained the full rights to all my work, from all the publishers I previously signed contracts with. Some of these publications were always intended to be published as one book or one work of literature.

I have now had the opporunity with my newly gained rights to combine all the books of the epic that took me years to write into one publication as it was always intended to be, with all the original sections, words and chapters included.

This epic is published as Hexagon, combining all the books of The Hesiad and Apolliad into one wholistic work of literature. I made the illustration and the cover art for this many years ago with this in mind. This is published now with Hera Publishing, a publisher that I also own.

Hexagon can be bought here

We are new on social media. You can follow us on all platforms of social media here.

Celebration

We (I) have very recently reached 10K all time views. To celebrate this milestone in our journey we have had a makeover with a new state of the art Children’s Books page as well as a dedicated Art page for all the paintings and sculpture.

We have also created new accounts on all main social media platforms. The links are below:

Facebook

Tiktok

Instagram

X

We are also on Spotify.

Amazon UK

Amazon US

Do follow us to keep up to date with everything we are up to.

Approved the cover proof for my book The Hesiad: A Brief Diary of a Heretical God. It is the first in a trilogy that traces the journey of a main character across several incarnations. The trilogy is lyrical verse and it is rooted in classical mythology. It is also highly influenced by some of my travels and adventures.

Cover

Survival and Oblivion: Egyptian Jews after the Second Exodus

Whenever Egypt is mentioned today in conversation, it is often with an assumed Islamic identity in mind. A minority of Christian Copts sometimes creeps into the discussion later on as an afterthought. This assumption is often accompanied by the rather unconscious or indirect presumption that there are few Jews in Egypt today, if any. This is not true.

It is easy to understand however why this is the mainstream account. The Second Exodus from Egypt occurred in 1956, under Colonel Nasser’s orders, stripping all Jews of their Egyptian citizenship and expelling them from Egypt. The vast majority of Egyptian Jews fled to one of three destinations of refuge: Israel, Mediterranean Europe (mainly France and Italy) and the Americas (primarily Argentina). This was, however, neither the beginning of trouble for Egyptian Jews in modern times, nor its end.

egyptian_alexandria_jewish_girls_during_batmitzva

Read more here

Article published in History Today on 8 May 2017.