Sakina B. Fakhri | Publications & Awards

Sakina B. Fakhri is a novelist and screenwriter based in Brooklyn. She received her B.A. in literature from Northwestern University and completed her M.A. at New York University; subsequently, she was part-founder and teacher at a high school in Cairo, Egypt and now owns and runs Scintilla Tutors, a boutique test prep company in NYC.

Committed to writing in all of its forms (except the factual!), she believes that, given enough time and enough creativity, nothing should ever have to be said in quite the same way twice. Her literary aesthetic tends towards theme-driven ornate prose, lyrical fiction, controlled absurdism, and political satire. Her first novel, The Speech of Flowers and Voiceless Things, probes the idea of a web of globalized mistranslations against a backdrop of a personable philanthropic enterprise and a caricaturesque dictator. Her first short film, "The Word Trader," debuted in 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival Court Metrage; her second short film, “Corner Piece,” was the winner of the 2015 Los Angeles Movie Award for Best Screenplay.

Her fiction has been published in Gemini Magazine and Hive. She continues to develop television and feature film concepts as she writes her second novel, which intertwines motifs of micro-trading, blindness, particle physics, and ballet.

Novel

Read Excerpts Here

The Speech of Flowers and Voiceless Things is a novel of absurdist political satire. In this work of literary fiction, a mistranslation in a single line of poetry instigates an escalating ripple of misconstrued text that threatens to culminate in a world war over five-pronged forks.

We follow the present lives and flashbacks of an ensemble cast of translators who comprise a secret philanthropic organization (the Association of Translation Liaisons of the Altruistic States) in the Sahara Desert. These precocious orphans, culled from every corner of the Earth, struggle with the inviolable dictates against artistic creation imposed by the monomaniacal philanthropist who is their founder. Illicit acts of art inevitably devolve into mistranslations, and this string of mistranslations in the village of ATLAS implicates the second locale of the narrative, Hacylon, which is ruled by a cartoonish, tyrannical dictator.

Amelia Carlisle, the copiously intelligent, firm-handed Secretary General of IBIS (International Bureau of Independent States), establishes the secret village of ATLAS in hopes of a more meaningful globalized network. Astor, orphaned at the age of seven after a factory fire in Egypt, is ATLAS’s first recruit; he is eighteen years old when the novel begins and is beset by a deeply ingrained savior complex and a rampant perfectionism. Natalia, once an amanuensis for a reclusive theoretical physicist in Poland, resents the ATLASian restrictions on her knowledge and ceaselessly plots her escape. Clarence, a world-renowned journalist who is second-in-command, is burdened by the guilt of his secret betrayal of ATLAS several years prior and its ramifications for ATLAS’s impending dissolution. Ezdehar, the hired counselor, is a haunted playwright who has been brought to ATLAS after a traumatic mental breakdown in Tanzania; she contends with her compulsion to flee and write her masterpiece.

The Speech of Flowers and Voiceless Things was first published by Lazuli Literary Group in April 2016; the second edition was published in February 2019.

The Sapphire Archives (Book reviews/reflections)

Notes on genius, heartbreak, and beauty in Maria Popova's "Figuring"

Notes on the peculiar narrative trajectory of Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees"

Notes on the melancholy wisdom of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"

AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought

SHORT STORY: The Last Allusionist
SHORT STORY: Seasons on a Gravestone
FLASH FICTION: Contagion and the Dinner Guest
ESSAY: Desuetude: Vocabulary, The New SAT & Algerian Post-Colonialism
EXCESSIVELY SHORT PLAY: Two Mice in a Black Box & the Deconstruction of Language
POETRY: On Poetry and Prose
NOVEL EXCERPT: AZURE Original Series - Installment 1: Aurelia - A Ballet in Prose (Libretto)
NOVEL EXCERPT: AZURE Original Series - Installment 2: Aurelia - A Ballet in Prose (Act I)
NOVEL EXCERPT: AZURE Original Series - Installment 3: Aurelia - A Ballet in Prose (Act 2 - Part 1)

Gemini Magazine

Honorable Mention: 2014 Short Story Contest
A Desert Prayer

Hive

Narratives Section: May 2015
Mistranslation in Images

Film/TV

The Word Trader: Lester Harrigan is a salesman of a most curious commodity - the word. Traumatized by an innate ability to 'see' into the tangle of words that make up our consciousness, he embarks on a lifelong quest to find one pivotal word that has been erased from all existence. (Short Film, 2013 - Produced by LuminouStudios & SB Talkies)

Staff Writer for Muslim Kids TV (2022-2023): Sci-fi/History shows for children (ages 7-12)

AWARDS

Short Screenplay: Corner Piece (2015)

Best Screenplay: California International Shorts Festival
Best Short Screenplay: Los Angeles Movie Awards
Finalist: Irvine International Film Festival
Finalist: H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival
Finalist: Toronto International Film & Video Awards

Short Screenplay: The Word Trader (2013)

Premiere: Cannes Film Festival - Court Metrage
Official Selection: Manhattan Film Festival
Official Selection: Big Apple Film Festival
Official Selection: International Film Festival of Manhattan

Television series (written concept pitch): Nullspace

Semi-finalist: NexTV (2015)

Television series (video pitch): Nullspace

Semi-finalist: ATX Pitch Festival (2016)
Quarter-finalist: NexTV (2016)

Television Series (pilot script): Nullspace

Finalist: Los Angeles New Wave International Film Festival (2016)
Semi-finalist: Austin Revolution Film Festival (2016)
Quarter-finalist: Screencraft Pilot Launch - Drama (2016)

Critical Essay: Reading Moral Absoluteness in Melville's 'Pierre'

Honorable Mention: Robert M. Mayo Memorial Prize

Short Story: A Desert Prayer

Honorable Mention: Gemini Magazine (2014)