The whirlwind and the saint

Dave Eggers is the very model of the engaged writer. Since publishing his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has branched out into all kinds of philanthropic literary activity. His organisation, McSweeney’s, has become a major imprint, championing emerging writers. In San Francisco, he has set up a community writing project, called 826 Valencia, which now has branches in six other cities.

In 2004, he created Voice of Witness, ‘a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world’. In one project, people talked about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina and that was where he first read the story of Zeitoun, and was so struck by it that he has now converted it himself into a full-scale narrative, with all the royalties donated to ‘the Zeitoun Foundation’.

Abdulrahman Zeitoun came originally from a fishing village on the coast of Syria. After ten years crewing on ships, he arrived in the United States on an oil tanker in 1988 and found work as a builder’s labourer.