للحكايات مرسى
Marsa is an independent publishing house rooted in Egypt and the Mediterranean, publishing fiction, non-fiction, poetry and translation from across North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe and their diasporas.
Stories shaped by movement.
Our books
A small list on purpose. Marsa publishes books with distinctive voices, unexpected forms and stories that travel between cultures, languages and places. Each of our first three books arrived from a different direction. Each sits slightly awkwardly on the shelf it was supposed to belong to.
Featured book
Some stories find you across water.
A diplomat is murdered in her locked quarters seventeen days before signing a historic peace accord. Her door logs confirm no one entered. The logs are telling the truth.
When Chief Negotiator Lyra Valen is found dead on Equilibrium Space Station, Inspector Arin arrives to untangle a murder that technically couldn't have happened. Armed with a controversial neural implant that reads emotional residue off physical objects, Arin navigates a maze of station politics, bitter rivalries, and deeply guarded secrets.
Every suspect—from Lyra's clandestine lover to her fierce political rivals—has a motive, but every alibi holds firm. As Arin delves deeper into the nine hundred pages of the treaty Lyra died to complete, they uncover a single, devastating flaw hidden within the data—a truth so explosive that exposing it will shatter the peace, while concealing it will let a killer walk free.
Atmospheric, intricate, and deeply emotional, Echoes of Equilibrium is a masterclass sci-fi whodunit about the cost of compromise, the weight of small choices, and the devastating price of peace.
The first case in a sequence. The detective it introduces will return, and so will the questions this one leaves open.
Between shores. For what's next.
Next from Marsa
The modern haunting isn't a ghost. It's a retention policy.
Teo Vasquez-Lindt moved a cooler eleven feet. That is all he did, and he will say it to himself every day for the next two and a half years.
By January, he is running Kesselring Loew, the youngest chief executive in its history. He is extraordinary at the job because nothing in a meeting can frighten a man who has already done the worst thing he will ever do.
A comedy noir about ambition, succession, and the love neither man would name.
About Marsa
There are stories that don't fit neatly on one shelf. Too Arab for one audience. Too foreign for another. Too rebellious, too political, too strange, too difficult to translate, or simply written from a place publishing hasn't learned how to see yet.
Marsa exists for those stories.
Marsa means harbour: a place of arrival, departure and temporary belonging. We are an independent publishing house rooted in Egyptian and Mediterranean experience, based in Lisbon and open to the wider worlds that meet there: North Africa, the Middle East, Southern Europe, Turkey and their diasporas.
We publish writing that crosses borders without asking permission. Writing that complicates where we come from. Writing that imagines where we might go next.
Publishing
Four lists, though the books we want most are the ones that refuse to stay inside one of them.
Novels, novellas and short stories that take risks formally, culturally or politically. We are drawn to literary, speculative, loud and diasporic fiction, and especially to work that sits somewhere between established categories.
Essays, memoir, narrative non-fiction and cultural criticism exploring identity, migration, gender, work, culture and belonging. We want writers who make us reconsider something we thought we understood.
Original and translated poetry from emerging and established voices across the Mediterranean and beyond. We are drawn to work that crosses languages, forms and borders, and to editions that give poems room to breathe.
Literary translation between Arabic and English, alongside work crossing French, Greek and Turkish. We believe translators are writers. Their names belong on our covers.
Submissions
We're looking for fiction, non-fiction, poetry and translation with a strong voice, a reason to exist and something at stake:
Leave your email below and we'll send you the complete submission guidelines. Established writers are welcome. So are writers who have never published a book before.
Events in Lisbon and beyond
Books should leave the bookshelf occasionally.
Marsa Nights brings writers, readers, translators, artists and wonderfully opinionated strangers together around books and ideas: readings, literary salons, dinners, debates and occasional nights that become something else entirely.
Beginning in Lisbon. Travelling wherever Marsa finds a harbour.
Newsletter
New books and writers. Essays, translations and reading recommendations. Occasional dispatches from somewhere across the Mediterranean.
