Brad Fox
BIOGRAPHY
Brad Fox is a novelist and nonfiction writer living in New York. His first book-length nonfiction experiment, The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths (Astra House 2023) was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Science and Literature prize and named a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. His novel To Remain Nameless (Rescue Press 2020) was a staff pick at The Paris Review and selected as best of the year by Dennis Cooper and The Millions. His stories and articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Guernica, The Paris Review Daily, and The Public Domain Review. His new nonfiction book, Another Bone-Swapping Event, will be published by Astra House in 2025.
PROJECT
While at Nawat Fes, Fox will be at work on a book at the intersection of history, fiction, and essay jumping off from the life and legacy of the thirteenth century traveler Badr al-Din al-Habashi. Arriving in Fez after escaping slavery in Ethiopia, Al-Habashi met the Andalusian visionary writer Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi, and the two traveled together for the next twenty-seven years. They crossed North Africa to Egypt, where they survived a major plague outbreak. They spent time in Jerusalem and Mecca, Baghdad and Mosul. They witnessed Damascus before it fell to the Mongols, and Anatolia as the Ottomans were supplanting the Seljuks. While Ibn ‘Arabi is among the most prolific writers in any language, Al-Habashi—described by his companion as the embodiment of perfect wisdom—left almost no trace beyond his signature affixed to manuscripts indicating his presence as a listener.The Book of the Silent Witness draws on archival research, historical study, and notes from site visits to places Ibn ‘Arabi and Al-Habashi passed through. The book will explore Al-Habashi as a historical figure but also as a riddle, unrecorded and overlooked but receptive and sustaining.