News
18th March 2020
Egypt Arrests Activists Including Ahdaf Soueif over Coronavirus Protest
Egyptian security forces arrested the Booker-shortlisted novelist Ahdaf Soueif and three other women after they staged a protest demanding the release of prisoners over fears of a coronavirus outbreak in the country’s overcrowded jails.
Soueif, her sister Laila Soueif, the activist Mona Seif and Rabab El-Mahdi, a political science professor, held a small demonstration in central Cairo on Wednesday afternoon.
“We are in front of the cabinet, asking for the state to take serious steps regarding corona in prisons. As we know, at any time Egypt’s prisons are clusters for disease,” Mona said in a Facebook live video, according to Ahdaf Soueif’s son, Omar Robert Hamilton.
Continue reading on The Guardian
[Note: Ahdaf was released on bail two days later]
Ahdaf Soueif has been awarded the European Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award for Culture.
She was honoured for her writing, her activism and her imagining of PalFest.
The annual prize selected her for "courageously merging literature and activism, building a body of fiction and committed journalism that responds to the legacies of European intervention in conflicts outside of the continent’s immediate territorial boundaries.
The Palestine Festival of Literature (2008–present), of which she is founding chair, created a new form of international cultural cooperation.
Soueif's consistent opposition to both authoritarianism and colonialism has marked her as a cultural figure of international importance inspiring new generations of critical voices throughout Europe and its neighbouring regions."
22nd July 2019
British Museum Workers Issue Statement in Support of Trustee Who Resigned
Read on Hyperallergic
Ahdaf Soueif Resigns from British Museum Board of Trustees
After serving for seven years on the Board of Trustees for the British Museum, Ahdaf Soueif today announces that she has resigned her position.
In an article for the London Review of Books she outlines her reasons.
“My resignation was not in protest at a single issue; it was a cumulative response to the museum’s immovability on issues of critical concern to the people who should be its core constituency: the young and the less privileged.”
Read it here.
3rd June 2017
PalFest: We go through checkpoints, then we Read
‘And were it not for my own children, back (home), I would stay. Stay in this city that brings out the cleanest and the clearest of me – and bear witness.”
I wrote this in Jerusalem, in December 2000. My second novel, The Map of Love, had just been shortlisted for the Booker prize, the second intifada had just broken out, and the Guardian had sent me to Palestine to write about it. In a sense I did stay, I stayed engaged, and the “children” came with me. Seventeen years later there’s been no third novel, but there’s been the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest to its friends – a communal idea that swept up family, friends and colleagues, making PalFestivalians of us all. Three weeks ago, we celebrated our 10th birthday.
Continue reading on The Guardian