Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love which was shortlisted \
for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. \
Ms Soueif is also a political and cultural commentator; she writes regularly for the Guardian in London and has a weekly column for al-Shorouk in Cairo.\
A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, \
was published in 2004. \
Her translation (from Arabic into English) of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah \
also came out in 2004.\
She lives in London and Cairo.