On Kasr el Nil Street, a short walk from Tahrir Square, stands the headquarters of the publishing house. It was established in an apartment but is now the new Mecca of Egyptian literature. "When I founded this publishing house in 1998,” the publisher said in an interview with Qantara.de, “I decided that I had to accomplish something important. Or I would have committed suicide." A die-hard opposition figure, Hashem was politically active in the ’70s during the regime of Sadat.