Ahdaf Soueif's debut novel,
In the Eye of the Sun (1993), set in Egypt and England, recounts the maturing of Asya, a beautiful Egyptian woman who, by her own admission, "feels more comfortable with art than with life". Soueif's second novel,
The Map of Love (1999), was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, has been translated into 21 languages and sold more than a million copies. She has also published two books of short stories,
Aisha (1983) and
Sandpiper (1996) – a selection from which was combined in the collection
I Think Of You in 2007, and
Stories Of Ourselves in 2010. Soueif writes primarily in English, She translated
Mourid Barghouti's
I Saw Ramallah (with a foreword by
Edward Said) from Arabic into English. Along with her readings of Egyptian history and politics, Soueif also writes about Palestinians in her fiction and non-fiction. A shorter version of
Under the Gun: A Palestinian Journey was originally published in
The Guardian and then printed in full in Soueif's 2004 collection of essays,
Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, and she wrote the introduction to the
New York Review Books 2003 reprint of
Jean Genet's
Prisoner of Love. She was elected a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In 2008, she initiated the first
Palestine Festival of Literature, of which she is the Founding Chair. Soueif is also a cultural and political commentator for
The Guardian newspaper, and she has reported on the
Egyptian revolution. In January 2012, she published
Cairo: My City, Our Revolution – a personal account of the first year of the Egyptian revolution. Her sister
Laila Soueif, and Laila's children,
Alaa Abd El-Fatah and
Mona Seif, are also activists. Soueif was married to
Ian Hamilton, with whom she had two sons:
Omar Robert Hamilton and Ismail Richard Hamilton. She was appointed a trustee of the
British Museum in 2012 and re-appointed for a further four years in 2016. However she resigned in 2019 complaining about BP's sponsorship, the reluctance to re-hire workers transferred to
Carillion and lack of engagement with repatriating artworks. In June 2013, Soueif and numerous other celebrities appeared in a video showing support for activist and whistleblower
Chelsea Manning. ==Political views==