Radwa Ashour

Biographical note

 

Radwa Ashour is an Egyptian writer and scholar born in Cairo, Egypt in 1946. She graduated from The Faculty of Arts, Cairo University (1967) and has an MA in Comparative Literature from Cairo University (1972) and a PhD in African American Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1975).

Ashour has published 7 novels, an autobiographical work, 2 collections of short stories and 5 criticism books. Part I of her Granada Trilogy won the Cairo International Book Fair “1994 Book of the Year Award”; the Trilogy won the First Prize of the First Arab Woman Book Fair (Cairo, Nov. 1995). The Granada Trilogy was translated into Spanish (Editiones del Oriente y del Mediterraneo); part I of the Trilogy was translated into English (Syracuse University Press and AUC Press, Cairo). Siraaj, An Arab Tale was published in English translation (The University of Texas Press), and Atyaaf was published in Italian (Ilisso Edizioni). Her short stories have been translated into English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Ashour has co-edited a major 4-volume work on Arab women writers (2004); The English translation: Arab Women Writings: A Critical Reference Guide: 1873-1999 (AUC Press 2008) is an abridged edition of the Arabic original.  

As a translator Ashour has co-translated, supervised and edited the Arabic translation of Vol. 9 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (2005). She has also translated Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications, 2008).

In 2007 Ashour was awarded the 2007 Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature.

Ashour is currently professor of English and Comparative Literature, Ain Shams University, Cairo.