The Screen Novel: Storytelling Through Digital Interfaces
About the Workshop
Join a bilingual (English/Arabic) creative writing workshop that explores the Screen Novel, where everyday screens become the story itself.
In this introductory bilingual creative-writing workshop, participants will explore the possibilities of the Screen Novel through examples, discussion, and a guided writing exercise. No prior experience in digital design, programming, or creative writing is required.
Event Details
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Location |
Danforth Lounge, 2nd Floor, CUC |
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Date |
Wednesday, October 21, 2026 |
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Time |
5:30-7:00 pm |
A Note on the Screen Novel
The Screen Novel is an experimental form of digital storytelling that reimagines the epistolary novel for the age of smartphones, platforms, and personal digital archives. It does not use screenshots or digital images merely as illustrations accompanying a conventional narrative. Rather, it treats digital interfaces themselves—text messages, notifications, emails, maps, call logs, search histories, social-media feeds, and lock screens—as the primary surface of narration.
In a Screen Novel, readers encounter a story through fragments: an unanswered message, a deleted conversation, a location pin, an online profile, a notification appearing at an unexpected moment, or the silence created by the absence of a reply. Plot, character, time, and emotional experience emerge gradually from these partial traces. The reader is therefore not only a recipient of the narrative but also an active participant in reconstructing its missing connections.
The form is especially attentive to the ways contemporary life is shaped by screens. Our friendships, desires, conflicts, memories, migrations, and losses increasingly unfold through digital devices and platforms. The Screen Novel seeks to explore this reality aesthetically and critically, asking how digital interfaces alter our sense of intimacy, privacy, memory, presence, absence, and storytelling itself.
The Screen Novel should not be confused with the interactive novel, the cinematic novel, or the comics novel. Its central concern is not reader choice, filmic technique, or sequential illustration. Instead, it recognizes the screen as a narrative environment: a space where language, image, time, emotion, and social relations meet. By bringing Arabic and English materials, multilingual communication, and cross-cultural digital archives into dialogue, the form also opens new possibilities for writing across languages, borders, and media.
About the Speaker
Mukhtar Saad Shehata (مختار سعد شحاته), Writer and Researcher, Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics, 糖心Vlog视频
Mukhtar Saad Shehata is an Egyptian writer and researcher in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Applied Languages at 糖心Vlog视频. He is the recipient of the 2019 Ibn Battuta Prize for Travel Writing for An Arab’s Diary in the Land of Samba and the author of more than fifteen books spanning fiction, short stories, literary criticism, and anthropological research.
His best-known works include Macaques of Africa, forthcoming in English translation in the United States; Shared Margins, co-authored with Samuli Schielke, on the conditions of creativity and writing; and Semi-Cities, a study of social, spatial, and digital transformations in the Egyptian countryside, particularly the northern Nile Delta. His work develops the concepts of the “Screen Novel,” “semi-city,” and “electronic masculinity,” exploring the intersections of storytelling, digital media, and everyday social life.
Registration
Register by October 09, 2026.
