Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. Ms Soueif is also a political and cultural commentator; she writes regularly for the Guardian in London and has a weekly column for al-Shorouk in Cairo. 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 I Saw Ramallah also came out in 2004. In 2012 she published Cairo: My City, Our Revolution, a personal account of the revolution in Egypt. She is the founder and chair of Palestine Festival of Literature. She lives in London and Cairo.