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Speakers at the 41st Cairo International Book Fair
Ahdaf Soueif
Amin Haddad
Anthony Horowitz
Bahaa Jaheen
Bahaa Taher
Ben Okri
Carolyn Perry
David Almond
David James
Deborah Moggach
Gaber Asfour
Hazem Azmy
Hoda Elsadda
Jamal Mahjoub
James Meek 
                                                              Leontia Flynn
Margaret Drabble
Marina Warner
Meg Rosoff
Menna Elfyn
Mona Baker
Paul Farley
Quentin Cooper
Rachel Morris
Radwa Ashour
Sabry Hafez
Samia Jaheen
Samia Serageldin
Soheir Metwali
Subathra Subramaniam 

Ahdaf Soueif

A short story writer, novelist and political and cultural commentator, Ahdaf Soueif needs no introduction to an Egyptian audience. Her 1983 novel, Aisha, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. Other novels include In the Eye of the Sun (1992) and Sandpiper (1996). Her 1999 novel, The Map of Love, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and was subsequently translated into 16 languages. In recent years she has focused on journalism rather than writing fiction. In 2008, she organised the Palestine Festival of Literature, taking a number of European writers to Palestine for readings and other events.
Ahdaf Soueif’s Contemporary Writers entry
Ahdaf Soueif’s personal website
Ahdaf Soueif’s writing room
The Palestine Literature Festival

Amin Haddad

Amin is an Egyptian poet born in Cairo in 1958.  He holds a BSc in Engineering from Cairo University (1981).  He has four published poetry collections written in colloquial Egyptian Arabic.  The first was The Scent of Loved Ones (1990), followed by The Sweetness of Life (1998); then In Death We Shall Live (2004) and finally, “An ID Replacement (2008). Haddad has written one children’s book of stories and rhymes with the title ‘What Lovely Weather’ in 2007.  He is the founder of El Sharie (The Street) group for poetry and song and has been performing in poetry and song since 1985, in Egypt as well as in other Arab countries such as Lebanon and Bahrain.

Anthony Horowitz

Horowitz is most well known as an author of fiction for children and young adults, but is also heavily involved in writing for television. His television work includes Midsomer Murders and Foyle’s War. He began writing professionally at the age of 20 and is a prolific writer, purported to spend 10 hours a day on his various projects. His books include the Alex Rider series, about a teenage secret agent. The first one, Stormbreaker, was adapted for film in 2006 for which Horowitz wrote the screenplay. The series was included in the top 10 of the New York Times bestseller lists in 2007. Skeleton Key won the Red House Children’s Book Award in 2002 and Ark Angel won the 2006 British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year. His Diamond Brothers series of detective stories and, more recently, the supernatural Power of Five series are all bestsellers. In 2008 he won the Booktrust Teenage Prize for Snakehead, part of the Alex Rider series.السيرة الذاتية

Anthony Horowitz’s Contemporary Writers entry
Anthony Horowitz’s personal website
Alex Rider teenage spy
National Year of Reading message from Anthony Horowitz
Anthony Horowitz on The Book Show

Bahaa Jaheen

Born in Cairo in 1958, Bahaa Jaheen holds a BA in English Literature, Cairo University (1978) and an MA in Comparative Literature from the American University in Cairo (1985).  After graduation, he worked as an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English Literature and Language, Cairo University.  He then joined Al Ahram newspaper where he worked as an editor. He now supervises the literary page of Al Ahram.  He is a member of a number of literary organisations such as the Poetry Committee at the Supreme Council for Culture. He has a number of poetry publications both in colloquial Egyptian Arabic as well as classical Arabic. These are: Dancing in Busy Traffic (1986), The Haunted Shirt (1990), Days (1996), Personal Revelations (2000), A Woollen Scarf for Winter (2003), The Allowed Height is One Metre ( 2004) and finally The Story of Muhalhal with Malik Al Zaman in 2005.  He has translated some major works such as Songs and Sonnets of John Dunn (2003).

Bahaa Taher

Bahaa Taher was born in Cairo in 1935. He holds postgraduate diplomas in history and mass media from Cairo University. Since he published his first short story in 1964 he has published 14 books (six novels, four short story collections and four non-fiction works) many of which have been translated. After working as a translator at the United Nations in Geneva in the 1980s and 90s, he returned to Egypt and received much literary acclaim for his work. He received the State Award of Merit in Literature, Egypt’s highest honour for writing, in 1998, and the Italian Guiseppe Acerbi Prize for his novel Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery in 2000. His novel Love in Exile is published in English by the AUC Press. In 2008 Taher was the first winner of the $50,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel Sunset Oasis, which will be published in English in 2009.

Egypt Today interview with Bahaa Taher
Cairo’s greatest literary secret
Taher wins the ‘Arabic Booker’

Ben Okri

Poet and novelist Ben Okri was born in Nigeria and spent a large part of his childhood and youth moving between London and Nigeria. His first two novels, Flowers and Shadows (1980) and The Landscapes Within (1981) are both set in Nigeria and feature as central characters two young men struggling to make sense of the disintegration and chaos happening in both their family and country. In 1991 Okri was awarded the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road. An Arabic translation of The Famished Road will be launched during the Cairo International Book Fair 2009. His latest novels are In Arcadia (2002) and Starbook (2007). A collection of poems, An African Elegy, was published in 1992 and an epic poem, Mental Flight, in 1999. His next novel, Tales of Freedom, will be published in April 2009. Okri argued in The Guardian newspaper in 2003 that the decline of a nation begins with the decline of its writers, because writers represent the unconscious vigour and fighting spirit of a land. Ben Okri is Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN. السيرة الذاتية

Ben Okri’s Contemporary Writers entry
Ben Okri on why teenagers are poets
Ben Okri discusses his approach to writing
Ben Okri talks about his book In Arcadia

Carolyn Perry

Carolyn Perry is the Manager of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology at UCL which houses one of the greatest collections of Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology in the world. She is also the Director of the MBI Al Jaber Foundation, a UK registered charity which aims to build bridges between the Middle East and the wider world through educational and cultural activities. Carolyn was formerly at the British Museum, where she set up and ran the Arab World Education programme. She has been in education throughout her career and has taught an age range from Early Years (in a Primary School in a London Borough) to Higher Education level (as a lecturer at the University of London). One of her specialist areas is cultural heritage and Carolyn led one of the first-ever British cultural tours to Saudi Arabia. She frequently lectures on various aspects of the ancient Mediterranean world and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Secretary of the British National Committee to Save Tyre

The light of Allah
The Petrie Museum

David Almond

David Almond was born and grew up on Tyneside. He is the author of Skellig, Kit’s Wilderness, The Fire-Eaters, Clay and many other novels, stories and plays. His work is translated into over thirty languages, and he has won a string of major awards, including the Carnegie Medal, two Whitbreads, two Smarties Prizes, The Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (USA) and The Michael L Printz Award (USA). His stage adaptation of Skellig, directed by Trevor Nunn, broke box-office records at The Young Vic. Other stage works include Wild Girl, Wild Boy, My Dad’s a Birdman and Heaven Eyes. His short stories are regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 4. A TV film of Clay, starring Imelda Staunton, was broadcast on BBC 1 in 2008. The movie of Skellig, starring Tim Roth, Kelly Macdonald and John Simm, will open in 2009. The opera of Skellig, with music by Tod Machover and libretto by Almond, premiered in 2008 to rave reviews. He is Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University, and is a regular speaker at festivals and conferences around the world. His latest books are The Savage, illustrated by Dave McKean, and the novel Jackdaw Summer. He lives with his family in Northumberland. David Almond’s books are strange, unsettling, wild things, unfettered by the normal constraints of children’s writing. They are, like all great literature, unclassifiable. The Guardian. السيرة الذاتية


David Almond’s Contemporary Writers entry
David Almond’s personal website
David Almond talks about his book Clay
David Almond turns hell into something positive
Skellig the opera
David Almond’s perfect day

David James

David James is a lecturer and senior scientist in the world leading Centre for Sport and Exercise Science at Sheffield Hallam University. David is a highly respected science communicator and has worked extensively with the media and groups of young people. David was the principal lecturer on the 2004 ‘Institute of Physics Schools Lecture Tour' (Engineering the Olympics) and he regularly delivers high profile public lectures on the role that technology plays in sport. He has a reputation for delivering lively, informative and engaging lectures and has appeared on countless stages including the Cheltenham Science Festival, the BA Festival of Science and the Royal Institution's Faraday lecture theatre. David has managed to make experiments actually work on live TV and is a regular commentator on the radio and in the press. He has worked with the CBBC on their XChange and Wizz Wizz, Bang Bang shows and was awarded the Research Councils' Science Communicators award after being the subject of the BBC documentary, Fasttrax.
Science helps Beckham bend it

Deborah Moggach

Deborah Moggach started writing in the mid-1970s when she was living in Pakistan for two years. Both her first novel, You Must Be Sisters (1978) and her second, Close to Home (1979), are semi-autobiographical. Altogether she has written sixteen novels, including The Ex-Wives (1993), Tulip Fever (1999), inspired by her love of 17th century Dutch painting, These Foolish Thing (2004) and In the Dark (2007). She has adapted many of her novels as television dramas and has also written several film scripts, including the BAFTA-nominated screenplay for Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley. Tulip Fever and These Foolish Things have also been filmed. Moggach likes to appear as an extra in her own shows. She is a former Chair of the Society of Authors and is on the executive committee of PEN.
Deborah Moggach’s Contemporary Writers entry
Deborah Moggach’s personal website
Deborah Moggach talks about These Foolish Things

Gaber Asfour

Gaber Asfour, professor at several Arab, European and American universities, is a former President of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture. Currently at the head of the National Translation Centre in Cairo, he plays a major role in the dissemination of Arab culture worldwide. His highly original literary criticism has gained international recognition. A champion of intercultural dialogue, he has promoted values such as women’s rights, respect for others, creative diversity and tolerance. In 2008 Dr Asfour was awarded the Unesco-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture

Hazem Azmy

Hazem Azmy is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. In his home country, Egypt he had an extensive career as theatre and interdisciplinary humanities scholar, university teacher, professional translator, dramaturg, cross-cultural speaker, and frequent contributor to scholarly, trade, and popular publications. He is the author of the entire portfolio on Egypt in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Oxford University Press, 2003). He is also the Editor of The Experimental, the English-language daily of the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theatre (CIFET). He has been one of the driving forces behind the formation of a new Arabic Theatre Working Group at the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT).He was recently appointed as member of the Executive Committee of the IFTR/FIRT as New Scholars' Representative (2008-10). Azmy is currently guest-editing (with Marvin Carlson) a special issue of Ecumenica titled Performing Islam/Muslim Realities (forthcoming in December 2008).
Hazem Azmy’s personal website

Hoda El Sadda

Professor Hoda

Elsadda currently holds a Chair in the Study of the Contemporary Arab World at Manchester University, and is Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World in the UK.  She is co-founder and current Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Women and Memory Forum.  She is a member of the Middle East panel in the British Academy; member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) since 2005;  Associate Editor of the Online Edition of the Encyclopedia of Women in Muslim Cultures published by Brill (2006);  Consultant Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (2008); and member of the Advisory board of The Global Fund for Women
Attitudes to Islam in the West

Jamal Mahjoub

Jamal Mahjoub was born in London to an English mother and Sudanese father. He spent his childhood in both England and Sudan. He won the Guardian/Heinemann African Short Story Prize for The Cartographer’s Angel in 1993. He identifies himself with the group of young British novelists inspired by the ‘Empire writes back’ novelists, such as Salman Rushdie. His first three novels, Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989), Wings of Dust (1994) and In the Hour of Signs (1996), focus on the British occupation of Sudan, while his fourth, The Carrier (1998), is a history of the telescope. His two most recent novels are Travelling with Djinns (2003) and The Drift Latitudes (2006). He lives in Barcelona.

James Meek

James Meek worked as a reporter for 20 years and won several awards for his work, including reports on Guantanamo Bay and from Iraq. He continues to contribute to The Guardian, the London Review of Books and Granta. He has published two books of short stories, Last Orders (1992) and The Museum of Doubt (2000). His three novels are Drivetime (1995), McFarlane Boils the Sea (1989) and, most recently, The People’s Act of Love (2005) set in Siberia during the Russian Revolution. This book won the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year and the 2006 Ondaatje Prize. A fourth novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, was published in 2008. Meek’s work is characterised by its seriousness of purpose and his respect for the writer’s profession. السيرة الذاتية

James Meek’s Contemporary Writers entry
James Meek’s personal website
James Meek in interview
James Meek on using dictionaries
Interview with James Meek

Leontia Flynn

Poet Leontia Flynn lives in Ireland and is Research Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her first collection, These Days, won the Forward Poetry Prize in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. In the same year, she was named as one of the Poetry Book Society’s ‘Next Generation’ poets. Her second collection, Drives, was published in 2004.
Leontia Flynn’s Contemporary Writers entry
Review of Leontia Flynn’s collection Drives
Listen to Leontia Flynn’s poetry
Toby Litt writes about Leontia Flynn

Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is primarily known as a novelist, but is also a critic and biographer. Her first novel, A Summer Birdcage, appeared in 1963 and was quickly followed by The Garrick Year (1964). Her third novel, The Millstone (1965) won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and cemented her acceptance in the literary world. Drabble’s prolific writing continued into the 1990s with The Witch of Exmoor (1996) followed by The Peppered Moth (2001). Her most recent novel is The Sea Lady (2006). Her novels are, on the surface, gentle investigations into the thoughts and emotions of female middle-class Englishness. Her prose is incisive and often cutting in its humour and insights. Drabble is also the highly regarded biographer of Arnold Bennett (1974) and Angus Wilson (1995). She also edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature.  Margaret Drabble is the current Chair of the Society of Authors. السيرة الذاتية

Margaret Drabble’s Contemporary Writers entry
Novelist feels pressure to ‘dumb down’

Marina Warner

Marina Warner, novelist, critic and cultural historian, has been an influential figure in British feminist writing since the 1970s. Her non-fiction includes Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), which won the Fawcett Book Prize. Her fiction includes In a Dark Wood (1977), The Skating Party (1982) and The Lost Father (1988), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. She was the first woman to deliver the BBC’s Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (1994). Her 1992 novel Indigo reworks The Tempest to explore themes of colonialism. As well as a collection of short stories and children’s books, Warner also wrote the libretti for a children’s opera, The Legs of the Queen of Sheba (1991) and the opera In the House of Crossed Desires (1996) by the composer John Woolrich. Marina Warner was brought up and educated in Cairo, where her father owned a bookshop.السيرة الذاتية

Marina Warner’s Contemporary Writers entry
Marina Warner’s personal website
Marina Warner talks about her book Signs and Wonders

Meg Rosoff

Meg Rosoff was born in Boston, USA, but has lived in London since 1977. She wrote her first novel, How I Live Now, in 2004. It won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. Her second novel, Just In Case (2006), won the 2007 Carnegie Medal. Her latest novel, What I Was (2007), is a love story and coming-of-age novel told by a 16-year-old boy. It was shortlisted for the 2008 Carnegie Medal and the 2007 Costa Children’s Book Award. In all her work Rosoff deals sensitively with the issues of adolescent emotions.
Meg Rosoff’s Contemporary Writers entry
Meg Rosoff’s personal website
Meg Rosoff talks about her book Just In Case
Meg Rosoff talks about her book How I Live Now

Menna Elfyn

Though Menna Elfyn is primarily known as a poet, constantly doing readings, recordings and festivals throughout the world, poetry is only a fraction of her work. She is a novelist, dramatist, and opera librettist; a teacher of creative writing, newspaper columnist and documentary-maker for Welsh language television and radio. Elfyn has been Writing Director of the MA Creative Writing programme at Trinity College, Carmarthen since 1998. She writes in Welsh. Her first bi-lingual book of poetry, Eucalyptus: Detholiad O Gerddi/ Selected Poems 1978-1994 was published in 1995, followed by Cell Angel (1996) and Cusan Dyn Dall/ Blind Man’s Kiss (2001). Elfyn’s most recent collection Perfect Blemish: New and Selected Poems 1995-2007 was published in 2007. Her work is often celebratory and wryly humorous about the foibles of humanity. Elfyn was for many years an anti-nuclear campaigner and is also passionate about preserving the diversity of languages. Menna Elfyn was made Poet Laureate for the Children of Wales in 2002.
السيرة الذاتية


Menna Elfyn’s Contemporary Writers entry
Menna Elfyn’s personal website
Teaching Menna Elfyn’s poetry
Read some of Menna Elfyn’s poems
Menna Elfyn reads Handkerchief Kiss/ Cusan Hances
Interview with Menna Elfyn

Mona Baker

Mona Baker is Professor of Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, UK. She is author of In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation (Routledge, 1992; second edition in preparation) and Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge, 2006), Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (1998, 2001; second edition 2008), Founding Editor of The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication (St. Jerome Publishing, 1995- ), Editor of the forthcoming Critical Concepts: Translation Studies (Routledge, 4 Volumes) and Critical Readings in Translation Studies (Routledge), and Editorial Director of St. Jerome Publishing. She is also Vice-President of IATIS (International Association of Translation & Intercultural Studies – www.iatis.org).
Mona Baker’s personal website
St Jerome Publishing

Paul Farley

Paul Farley is one of the most highly regarded young British poets. He won the Arvon Poetry competition in 1996 and his first collection, The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. The Ice Age was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Whitbread Poetry Award in 2003.Farley draws heavily on his Liverpool roots in his writing. His latest collection is Tramp in Flames, which was published in 2006. Farley currently lectures in creative writing at the University of Lancaster.
Paul Farley’s Contemporary Writers entry
Listen to Paul Farley’s poems
Interview with Paul Farley

Quentin Cooper

Quentin hosts BBC radio’s weekly The Material World, the UK's most listened to science programme, as well writing and presenting a range of other science output on radio, television and in print.   He also facilitates and directs a huge range of other science events in the UK and round the world – in the last year these include everything from science journalism workshops in Cuba to a biodiversity conference in Brazil, from the first European Commission forum on science communication in Spain to the training and finals for Europe-wide science talent contest FameLab.   He’s one of the judges for the new £25,000 Wellcome Trust Book Prize for medicine in literature launched in October 2008, and the same month he joined scientists plus Oscar-, Grammy-, Emmy-, Pulitzer- and other global arts prize-winners on the Cape Farewell climate change expedition to the west coast of Greenland.  Among the organisations he has worked with regularly and recently are the British Council, the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society, BBC Training, the Royal Institution, the Natural Environment Research Council, the Institute of Physics, the UK Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs, Astra Zeneca, The Natural History Museum, Cheltenham Science Festival, The World Diabetes Foundation and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Also a film critic and briefly a member of a clickboxing duo with Oscar-winner Ryuichi Sakamoto, The Times describes Quentin as ‘the world’s most enthusiastic man’ and ‘an expert on everything from pop music to astrophysics’, while the Daily Mail claims his ‘wit and enthusiasm can enliven the dullest of topics’.  He would like to make it clear that both newspapers are exaggerating.
Quentin Cooper’s BBC website
Quentin Cooper’s Cape Farewell blog

Rachel Morris

Rachel Morris is Director of Content and Learning at Metaphor, the exhibition designers for the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. Metaphor has designed major historical exhibitions for the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, as well as for museums and institutions in Cyprus, Prague, Singapore, Lausanne, Damascus and Cairo. Rachel trained as an archaeologist, and has a degree in Greek, Archaeology and Ancient History. Before moving into museum studies, she had two novels published. She has worked across Europe and in the Middle East and is intrigued by the complexity of telling stories across different cultures, by different historical traditions, and by the way that children in the UK have fallen in love with Egyptian mummies and pharaohs. Rachel believes that the only difference between museums and books is that books tell stories with words and museums tell stories with objects.
Metaphor

Radwa Ashour

Radwa Ashour is an Egyptian writer and scholar born in Cairo 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). She has published seven novels, an autobiographical work, two collections of short stories and four 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, 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 four-volume work on Arab women writers (2005); 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 (2006). She also translated Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight and Other Poems (Arc Publications, 2008). In 2007 Ashour was awarded the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature. She is currently professor of English and Comparative Literature, Ain Shams University, Cairo.

Sabry Hafez

Sabry Hafez is a prominent Egyptian British writer, critic and academic who has played a leading role in Arabic culture for the last 40 years. He has been an active member of writers’ and intellectuals’ communities in Egypt and Arab World, published many books, articles and essays and participated in numerous conferences in the Arab world, Europe and USA. He also taught modern Arabic and comparative literature in a number of leading universities in Europe (Oxford, London, Edinburgh, Uppsala and Stockholm) and the USA (Harvard and UCLA). He is currently research professor of modern Arabic and comparative literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. He is currently editor of the on-line Arabic cultural monthly Al-Kalimah (www.al-Kalimah,com). He wrote The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London, 1993), The Quest for Identities: The Development of the Modern Arabic Short Story (London, 2007), co-edited The Longman Anthology of World Literature (6 vols), (New York 2004), and Teaching World Literature (2 vols.), (New York, 2005) and introduced the Everyman’s edition  of Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy (Cairo and New York, 2001). He has written twenty books in Arabic on drama, poetry, travel literature and the Arabic novel and translated The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (T. S. Eliot) into Arabic with textual notes and critical introduction (Cairo, 1986).
Al Kalimah online literary magazine

Samia Jaheen

Samia has worked as a cultural activist since she graduated from the Faculty of Arts, Spanish Department, Cairo University in 2001.  She has taken part in most of the performances of  El Sharie (The Street) group for poetry and song, based on the works of great Egyptian poets.  She also worked as a Project Coordinator at Al Mawrid Al Thaqafy (Cultural Resource), an organisation working to encourage and create opportunities for the exchange of cultural activities within the Arab region, from 2004 to 2006. Jaheen also is a member of Eskendrella, founded by the renowned oud player and composer, Hazim Chahine, which specialises in re-introducing and reviving the works of Egyptian musicians Sheikh Sayed Darwish and El Sheikh Imam as well as performing their own work. Samia has co-managed a workshop for training the children of the Upper Egypt Choir on reading poetry and singing.  This workshop was led by Amin Haddad and resulted in two performances using the works of Fouad Haddad and Salah Jaheen.  Both El Sharie and Eskenderalla have joined in musical and poetry performances, some of which were at the British Council.

Samia Serageldin

Samia Serageldin was born and raised in Egypt, educated in Europe, and emigrated to the United States with her family in 1980. She holds a M. S. in Politics from the University of London, and is a writer, a political essayist, an editor and literary critic. She is the author of an autobiographical novel, The Cairo House, tracing political developments in Egypt over the past three decades, including the rise of Islamism and Sadat’s assassination. She has contributed essays and served as consulting editor on a book on globalisation and international terrorism, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden. Her new novel, The Naqib's Daughter will be released in Egypt during the Cairo International Book Fair
Samia Serageldin’s personal website
An interview with Samia Serageldin

Sohair Metwali

Sohair Metwali writes for several Egyptian and Arab newspapers and magazines, including Bulbul children’s magazine. She also writes scenarios for TV including the Arabic version of Sesame Street and Al Jazeera’s children’s channel in Qatar. Several collections of her poetry have been published, including Yes or No, Light and Dark and The Beginning of Memory. She has also published two books. She won a prize in 2001 for Light and Dark and in 2004 for Starting the Inscription Again.

Subathra Subramaniam

Subathra Subramaniam is a choreographer, dance artist and educator.  She was the co-founder and artistic director of Angika, one of the UK’s leading national touring dance companies in recent years.  Angika’s productions had a reputation for bringing an innovative, contemporary approach to the rich vocabulary of Bharata Natyam, a South Indian classical dance form.  Their critically acclaimed works involved regularly collaborating with a wide range of artists and designers including commissioning some of the most exciting international composers and musicians to create original soundtracks specifically for the choreography. Subathra is also a qualified science teacher and has a MA in Education. She taught science in a large secondary school for five years. One of her passions is creating and choreographing exciting projects that bring together the arts and science.  Her most recent project, ‘Dancing on Thin Ice’ involved working with 25 students, a scientist, a composer and a film maker to create a dance, music and media production around the theme of climate change. Subathra is co-director of Cape Farewell Education, a climate change project that brings together young people, artists, scientists, educators and journalists to raise awareness about climate change.  In September 2007 Cape Farewell Education took 12 young people from the UK, Canada and Germany to the Norwegian Arctic on a sail boat.  In September 2008, in conjunction with British Council Canada, 28 young people from the UK, Canada, Germany, Mexico, India, Brazil and Ireland went on a voyage to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. The aim of these voyages is to inspire young people to become climate change ambassadors in their communities. Subathra works regularly, focusing on arts/science collaborations, for organizations such as the British Council, Royal Geographical Society and The Natural History Museum. She has also presented educational, science and arts programmes for ‘Teacher’s TV’, a channel dedicated to schools and teachers.
Subathra Subramaniam’s dance company
Dancing on Thin Ice