Ahdaf Soueif

Born in Cairo and educated in Egypt and England, Soueif writes in English but inside Arab subject matter — a position she has called "writing from the hyphen". Her 1992 novel In the Eye of the Sun is a long, generous, English-language Bildungsroman about an Egyptian woman's sentimental and political education in Cairo and the north of England in the 1970s; it has become a touchstone for Arab-Anglophone fiction.

The Map of Love (1999), shortlisted for the Booker, weaves together two romances a century apart — an English woman in Lord Cromer's colonial Egypt of 1900 and a Palestinian-American conductor in the Cairo of the 1990s — to make a case for the long arc of Egyptian political possibility.

Soueif's essays — collected in Mezzaterra (2004) and the Tahrir memoir Cairo: My City, Our Revolution (2012) — have made her one of the most prominent Anglophone voices on Palestine and on the unfinished Egyptian uprising. She founded PalFest, the annual Palestine Festival of Literature, which since 2008 has brought writers from around the world to read in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza and Jerusalem.