Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif is a political and cultural commentator and one of Egypt’s most influential novelists. She writes about Egyptian and Palestinian politics and history. Her most recent book, This is Not a Border (2017), is a collection of essays, diaries, and poems reflecting on the first decade of the Palestine Festival of Literature. The festival takes place in occupied Palestine and was co-founded by Soueif in 2007. In 2014, she published a firsthand account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. Her book The Map of Love (1999) has been translated into over 30 languages and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. She received the first Mahmoud Darwich Award in 2010 and the European Culture Foundation Princess Margriet Award in 2019, among other honors.