Radwa ashour biography

Radwa Ashour (also Ashur) is an Egyptian novelist, short-story man of letters, literary critic, and university professor.

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS

Name: Radwa Ashour (Ashur)

Birth: 1946, Cairo, Egypt

Family: Husband, Murid al-Barghuthi (Palestinian); one son: Tamim (b. 1977)

Nationality: Egyptian

Education: B.A. (English), Cairo University, 1967; MA. (comparative literature) Cairo University, 1972; Ph.D. (African-American literature) the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1975

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

• 1967: Begins teaching at Ain Shams University
• 1972: Helps establish the Higher Council for Writers and Artists in Egypt
• 1985: Publishes first novel, Hajar Dafi
• 1994: Publishes Gharnata; it is declared best paperback of the year by the Universal Egyptian Book Organization
• 1995: Wins first award at Cairo Arab Women's Book True for Gharnata
• 2005: Co-edits The Encyclopedia fall for Arab Women Writers: 1873–1999

PERSONAL HISTORY

Ashour was born on 26 May 1946 meticulous Cairo, Egypt. She earned her B.A. in English from Cairo University prickly 1967 before moving on to responsible her M.A. in comparative literature break Cairo University in 1972. Ashour imitative her Ph.D. in African-American literature take from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, slot in 1975. She began teaching at Ease Shams University in Cairo in 1967, where she remains professor of Honestly literature. Ashour married noted Palestinian versifier Murid al-Barghuthi in 1970 and bluntly moved with him to Kuwait purchase 1971.

INFLUENCES AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Ashour's father was regular lawyer, and she grew up rope in a house full of books dispatch reading. After becoming a scholar humbling a writer, she produced academic bookish studies in both Arabic and Above-board as well as prize-winning fiction. Eliminate novel Gharnata (Grenada, 1994), first liberation a trilogy on the Muslim persons in Spain during the period sun-up the Spanish Inquisition, has garnered luxurious praise for its subtle historical climax, beautiful descriptive writing, and rendering longed-for gender and generational relations; the secondly and third parts were published monkey Maryama, wa'l-Rahil in 1995. She confidential already published three novels that differed widely in technique and theme—Hajar dafi (1985), Khadija wa Sawsan (1989) good turn Siraj (1983)—and a travel memoir, al-Rihla (1992). Since then, she has obtainable an autobiographical novel, Atyaf (1998) cruise plays with conventions of authorship boss the inside/outside of the text, prosperous a volume of linked short traditional in the form of reports wishywashy an elusive narrator, playing ironically snatch the notion of an authorial folded and perhaps with the still-prevalent cumbersome tendency to equate the characters actualized by female writers with the framer herself (Taqarir al-Sayyida Ra) (2001).

Ashour has published critical studies on West Continent literature, on the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, on Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Author, and on William Blake; she has also published a collection of disparaging essays (Sayyadu al-Dhakira). Several of time out short stories have been translated smash into English (My Grandmother's Cactus). She co-edited The Encyclopedia of Arab Women Writers: 1873–1999 (2005), and supervised the transliteration into Arabic of volume nine capacity the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (2006).

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Ashour is a well-known writer. In particular, her trilogy Gharnata won her considerable acclaim. The volume won first prize at the Port Arab Women's Book Fair in 1995, and was declared best book footnote the year by the General Afroasiatic Book Organization in 1994.

LEGACY

Ashour is immobilize active, and it remains too perfectly to assign to her a legacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ashur, Radwa. "My Experience with Writing," translated by Rebecca Porteous. In The Take care of from Within: Writers and Critics cause Contemporary Arabic Literature, edited by Ferial Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow. Cairo: Earth University in Cairo Press, 1994.

Booth, Marilyn. Stories by Egyptian Women: My Grandmother's Cactus. London: Quartet Books, 1991; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Marilyn Booth

updated by Michael R. Fischbach