السيدة الرئيسة

Al-Sayyida al-Ra'isa (The Madam President) is a collection of fifteen satirical short stories by the Tunisian novelist, critic and academic Shukri Mabkhout, published in Cairo by Dar El Ain in 2015. It was his first book of short fiction, appearing the year after his debut novel al-Talyani (The Italian) won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and he presented it at the 34th Sharjah International Book Fair that November.

The stories are set in a contemporary Tunisia still working through the aftermath of the January 2011 revolution. Mabkhout writes from inside the worlds of journalism and politics — newsrooms, party offices, the manoeuvring around them — and returns repeatedly to the antagonism between the secular left and the Islamists that also runs through The Italian. Desire, love and the body are the collection's other persistent subject. The longest piece, at roughly sixty-three pages, lends the book its title.

The register is satirical rather than polemical: the stories work by observation and irony, and readers have described the collection as an argument for reason and clear thinking against a society in flux. Mabkhout, born in 1962, was president of Manouba University and is the author of several novels and works of literary and linguistic criticism.