Since her groundbreaking article on the Palestinian Intifada in The Guardian in December 2000, Ahdaf Soueif has been an active and articulate advocate for Palestine. In 2007 she founded the Palestine Festival of Literature which takes place annually in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. In summer 2017 she co-edited the anthology This Is Not A Border: Reflections and Reportage from the Palestine Festival of Literature.
Soueif is author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into more than 30 languages), In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, her account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 (2014). She is also a political and cultural commentator. Her Mezzaterra (2004) has been influential and her articles for The Guardian are published in the European and American press. She is the translator of Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah into English.
Photo credit: Eamonn McCabe