Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif lives in London, UK and Cairo, Egypt. She studied for a Ph.D. at the University of Lancaster, UK and is the author of the novel The Map of Love, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground was published in 2004. Her translation (from Arabic into English) of Mourid Barghouti’s autobiography I Saw Ramallah also came out in 2004. Between 2011 and 2015 she had a weekly column for the Arabic-language national daily, al-Shorouk in Cairo. She writes regularly for The Guardian and is a political cultural commentator on Egypt and Palestine. Ahdaf Soueif is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, Pal Fest. Her latest book is her memoir of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Cairo: A City Transformed.