Global Dialogues

Ahdaf Soueif is a novelist and political and cultural commentator living and working in Cairo and London. Her novel, The Map of Love (1999), shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is translated into over 30 languages. Her collection of essays, Mezzaterra (2004), has been influential and her articles for the Guardian in the UK are published in the European and American press. In 2007, Soueif co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature. Her most recent book, This is Not a Border (2017), is a co-edited collection of essays and poems born of the festival. In 2014, she published a firsthand account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011: Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed. For Qatar Foundation she commissioned and edited Reflections on Islamic Art, a unique literary response to Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. She was the first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwich Award in 2010 and the European Culture Foundation Princess Margriet Award in 2019, among other honors.