R. Y. Abdulrehman is a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor with the Department of Clinical Health Psychology, in the College of Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba. Born to a Zanzibari family, his ancestral storytelling inspired Jinn in the Family, his first poetic novel. He is the founder of Lead With Diversity Press, the editor in chief of The Poetry of Angry Black and Brown People, and author (using the name Rehman Abdulrehman) of the bestselling Developing Anti-Racist Cultural Competence and co-author of Movies, Miniseries & Multiculturalism.
Fiction
Jinn in the Family
Lead With Diversity Press, 2026.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
When a Western-trained psychologist returns to Zanzibar, the stories he once dismissed as superstition rise up to meet him—alive, layered, and rooted in blood.
Raised in Canada and shaped by science, he believed identity was a matter of will. But in the heat and hush of his ancestral island, whispers of jinn and witches begin to unearth a deeper truth—one carved by exile, memory, and spirits that do not forget. Told in two intertwined timelines—“modernity” and “antiquity”—Jinn in the Family blends poetic fiction with cultural myth, weaving Arab, African, and Indian lineages into a haunting tapestry of inheritance. This novel asks what is lost when diasporic people abandon identity and the unseen, and what might be reclaimed when we finally listen to what was never gone. More than folklore. More than horror. This is the story of what lives in the quiet—and what refuses to die.
Awards and Honours
2026 Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award (Manitoba Book Awards)(Finalist)
2026 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction (Manitoba Book Awards)(Finalist)
Links
Publisher Lead With Diversity Press