Ahdaf Soueif

1950–

Egyptian novelist and commentator, born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England. She completed a doctorate in linguistics at Lancaster University in 1979 and writes mainly in English. Her first book was the story collection Aisha (1983), followed by the novel In the Eye of the Sun. She has translated Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah from Arabic and published the essay collection Mezzaterra. In 2008 she founded the Palestine Festival of Literature. The Map of Love, which links an Englishwoman’s marriage to an Egyptian nationalist with her descendants a century later, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize.

Timeline of Ahdaf Soueif’s life

Works

• The Map of Love (1999)

Prizes

• The Map of Love — The Booker Prize 1999: Shortlist