Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer, translator and political commentator, born in Cairo on 23 March 1950. ¹ Her novel The Map of Love (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into more than twenty languages; she founded the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008 and translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah into English. ¹

Soueif was born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England; she studied English literature at Cairo University and took a PhD in linguistics from Lancaster University in 1979. ¹ She has lived in Cairo, and wrote and taught English literature in Egypt before turning to fiction full-time. Her younger sister is the activist and mathematician Laila Soueif. ¹ She was a trustee of the British Museum from 2012 and resigned in 2019, writing that the board had failed to address her concerns about corporate sponsorship and the restitution of stolen artefacts. ¹ In 2020 she was briefly arrested in Cairo after protesting for the release of prisoners during the COVID-19 pandemic. ¹ The sources name no religion for Soueif herself — her work as editor of a volume on Islamic art and as a translator is recorded below as her work, not as a faith statement — and the museum records none. ^{1 2}

Her first book, the story collection Aisha (1983), was followed by the novel In the Eye of the Sun (1993) and the collection Sandpiper (1996). ¹ The Map of Love (1999), alternating between an Englishwoman travelling in Egypt in 1900 and her Egyptian-American great-granddaughter a century later, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into twenty-one languages, selling over a million copies. ¹ Her essays and reportage are collected in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004) and in her later books of Egyptian reportage, including Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012), written in the aftermath of the 2011 uprising. ¹ She translated Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah into English, edited Reflections on Islamic Art (2011), and in 2008 founded the Palestine Festival of Literature, of which she remains founding chair. ¹ She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and her awards include the Mahmoud Darwish Award (2010) and the Cavafy Award (2011). ¹

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