Exeter College alumnus publishes Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales

Exeter College alumnus Dr Omar Sabbagh (1999, PPE) has published a new collection of short prose, Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales (Sulfur Editions, February 2026), a volume that gathers fiction, auto-fiction and memoir into what he describes as an “overall auto-fictive statement” on his adult life to date. 

The book brings together eleven pieces of short prose, framed by a prefatory page and four autobiographical appendices. Some of the stories are near-complete inventions; others are slices of veiled memoir. Taken together, they form a mosaic of pivotal experiences, reflecting on memory, identity and the tensions that shape a life lived between cultures. 

As in his poetry, Sabbagh’s prose privileges cadence and atmosphere over spectacle. The pieces are unified less by plot than by voice – philosophical, intimate and alert to the emotional undercurrents of ordinary encounters. Across comic and tragic modes, and often in the liminal space between the two, the collection explores what it means to revisit and re-present the self through art. 

Early praise has described Sabbagh as a “21st-century man of letters”, attentive to the shape of a sentence and the moral weight of lived experience. With Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales, he continues a body of work that bridges the personal and the literary with clarity and depth. 

Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales is available to purchase from amazon and other booksellers.

Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales Cover Art