Ashour, Radwa (1946–)
Ashour, Radwa
(1946–)
Radwa Ashour (also Ashur) is an Egyptian novelist, short-story writer, 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 Committee for Writers and Artists in Egypt
- 1985: Publishes first novel, Hajar Dafi
- 1994: Publishes Gharnata; it is declared best book of the year by the General Egyptian Book Organization
- 1995: Wins first prize at Cairo Arab Women's Book Fair for Gharnata
- 2005: Co-edits The Encyclopedia of Arab Women Writers: 1873–1999
PERSONAL HISTORY
Ashour was born on 26 May 1946 in Cairo, Egypt. She earned her B.A. in English from Cairo University in 1967 before moving on to complete her M.A. in comparative literature from Cairo University in 1972. Ashour obtained her Ph.D. in African-American literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1975. She began teaching at Ain Shams University in Cairo in 1967, where she remains professor of English literature. Ashour married noted Palestinian poet Murid al-Barghuthi in 1970 and briefly moved with him to Kuwait in 1971.
INFLUENCES AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Ashour's father was a lawyer, and she grew up in a house full of books and reading. After becoming a scholar and a writer, she produced academic literary studies in both Arabic and English as well as prize-winning fiction. Her novel Gharnata (Grenada, 1994), first of a trilogy on the Muslim community in Spain during the period of the Spanish Inquisition, has garnered much praise for its subtle historical focus, beautiful descriptive writing, and rendering of gender and generational relations; the second and third parts were published as Maryama, wa'l-Rahil in 1995. She had already published three novels that differed widely in technique and theme—Hajar dafi (1985), Khadija wa Sawsan (1989) and Siraj (1983)—and a travel memoir, al-Rihla (1992). Since then, she has published an autobiographical novel, Atyaf (1998) that plays with conventions of authorship and the inside/outside of the text, and a volume of linked short stories in the form of reports by an elusive narrator, playing ironically with the notion of an authorial double and perhaps with the still-prevalent critical tendency to equate the characters created by female writers with the author herself (Taqarir al-Sayyida Ra) (2001).
Ashour has published critical studies on West African literature, on the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, on Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran, and on William Blake; she has also published a collection of critical essays (Sayyadu al-Dhakira). Several of her short stories have been translated into English (My Grandmother's Cactus). She co-edited The Encyclopedia of Arab Women Writers: 1873–1999 (2005), and supervised the translation into Arabic of volume nine of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (2006).
THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE
Ashour is a noted writer. In particular, her trilogy Gharnata won her considerable acclaim. The book won first prize at the Cairo Arab Women's Book Fair in 1995, and was declared best book of the year by the General Egyptian Book Organization in 1994.
LEGACY
Ashour is still active, and it remains too early to assign to her a legacy.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashur, Radwa. "My Experience with Writing," translated by Rebecca Porteous. In The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature, edited by Ferial Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow. Cairo: American 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