I'm Serag, a writer from Alexandria, Egypt, and a staff writer at MO4 Network and its main publication, CairoScene.
Outside the office, I write what I like to read: first-person longforms, portraits of people and places, and explorations of the natural world. I also write fiction.
After graduating from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023 with a Bachelor's degree in Energy and Environmental Engineering, I began on my first book, Portraits of a Coast, which I self-published in March 2026.
Portraits of a Coast: Stories from Egypt's Red Sea began as a marine conservation storytelling project that I undertook upon returning to Egypt after completing university in Hong Kong in 2023. A collection of 12 narrative essays with accompanying film photography, what has emerged is much more than I originally envisioned. This book, which I self-published in Cairo in 2026, is the result.
The essays are ordered chronologically within the period during which I travelled up and down the coast trying to understand the makeup of the communities that lived there, their connection to one another, and their connection to the sea. This included conservationists but also fishermen, tourists but also locals, miners and poets and imams and freedivers and sailors and many others.
A great deal of gratitude is owed to my editor and former classmate, Heidi Aref, whose efforts hugely improved the writing found in these essays and were instrumental in making the book possible. I am grateful as well to Zeina El Zomor for the design of the book. With special thanks to Abdalla El Tayeb, Abdallah Taher, Ahmed Amin, Anna Fuglsang, Carlos Diezel, Maja Zamencka, Mariam Tawila, Micol Montagna, Mo Hammoud, Shubhangi Thakur, and the team at Cairo Analog Society.
Across essays, interviews, and fiction.
