RIYADH: “Mourning Air” by Leena Magdi is an intimate meditation on grief, belonging, faith and the enduring love between siblings.
Published in April 2025 by The Dreamwork Collective, it is a deep breath of a book, though perhaps more accurately, as Magdi suggests in her introduction, “a written exhale”: an attempt to release what has become too heavy to carry alone.
At its center is the sudden death of the writer’s younger brother, Hamoodi, who was killed by an RSF soldier in August 2022.
The author releases her grief onto the page and follows its path through memory, spirituality, poetry and the ordinary rhythms of a world that goes on even when one’s own seems to have stopped.
At the heart of the book is the love between siblings, especially an elder sister and her little brother. Magdi’s prose has the unguarded honesty of a journal, and it is threaded with her own poetry as well as pieces by her late brother. His words appear on the page alongside hers, ensuring that he is not only mourned here but heard.
The question of homeland occupies an important place in her writing. Born in Sudan, she left as a child, arriving in the US at the age of 5.
