Ahdaf soueif biography of williams

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Connections

Ahdaf Soueif is married Ian Hamilton, a writer. In 2008 she obtained an Honorary Doctor of Litterature from the Exeter University.

Works

• book

  • Reflections on Islamic Art

    (The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, houses manuscri...)

    2011
  • In the Eye of the Sun

    (Set amidst the turmoil of contemporary Middle Eastern pol...)

    1992
  • Sandpiper

    (Sandpiper is a collection of stories which provide insigh...)

    1996
  • Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed

    (When throngs of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square to de...)

    2014
  • Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground

    (This is an incisive collection of essays on Arab identity...)

    2004
  • Cairo: My City, Our Revolution

    (Ahdaf Soueif - novelist, commentator, activist - navigate...)

    2012
  • I Think of You

    (Ahdaf Soueif, the bestselling author of The Map of Love, ...)

    2007
  • The Map of Love

    (Here is an extraordinary cross-cultural love story that u...)

    1999
  • Aisha

    (This is a collection of short stories that almost exclusi...)

    1983

Membership

Ahdaf Soueif is a member of the Egyptian-British Society, of the Egyptian Writers' Union, of the Amnesty International, and of the Committee for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

Education

Ahdaf Soueif educated at schools in Cairo and London. She is the founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature, Pal Fest. But setting up a discourse against them alienated a lot of people! You would talk to people and they’d say, ‘Why is everybody insulting the Islamists? You can see why and how this happened though.

The liberal forces that had the money to go down and start working in the street from 11 February onwards didn’t – they sat and talked among themselves as they have always done and argued and obsessed about the Islamists and you couldn’t attend a meeting with any of them without them predominantly talking about the Islamists and how scary they were and how backward and how organised and… OK, so go on the street and work!

In the Eye of the Sun, about a young Egyptian woman's life in Egypt and England, where she goes to study as a postgraduate, set against key events in the history of modern Egypt, was published in 1992. In 1971 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature from Cairo University. She has a sister, Laila Soueif, a mathematician and human and women's rights activist.

Her work Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) is a personal account of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Hoping to find keys to understanding him, Isabel travels to Omar's homeland, taking with her an old truck full of papers she inherited from Anna.

^A

Ahdaf Soueif

— They are not, of course, what we would have wanted.

In Cairo, Isabel and Omar's sister, Amal, unwrap Anna's treasures and discover an unsuspected blood link between their families: Amid Anna's diaries and letters and newspapers crackling with age is a notebook written in Amal's grandmother's hand recounting the story of her brother, Sharif, and the Englishwoman he loved. Even if the Islamists were lying and were going to double-cross us, we should have believed in their good faith and worked with them.

They have two sons.

Spouse:

Ian Hamilton

Sister:

Laila Soueif

niece:

Mona Seif

nephew:

Alaa Abd El-Fattah

References