Ahdaf Soueif

A political and cultural commentator and author. Her bestselling book, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1999) and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Cairo: a City Transformed, came out in January 2014. Her collection of essays, Mezzaterra (2004), has been influential. From 2011 to 2015, she wrote for al-Shorouk in Egypt. In 2007, Ms Soueif co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature, which takes place annually in the cities of occupied Palestine and Gaza. The first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwish Award (Palestine) (2010), she has also received the Metropolis Bleu (Canada) and the Constantine Cavafy (Egypt and Greece) (2012) awards. In October 2019, she received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margriet Award for Culture.