Ahdaf Soueif & Adania Shibli

"Common Grounds and Belongings: A critical look at the Civic"

The writers Ahdaf Soueif (Egypt/London) and Adania Shibli (Palestine) speak with Kostis Papaioannou.

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. 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 with her children in London and Cairo.

Adania Shibli, born in Palestine, has published short stories and essays in such literary magazines as Ramallah’s "Al-Karmel", the Beirut literary periodicals "Al-Adaab" and "Zawaya", and Alexandria’s "Amkenah". Many of these pieces have been translated into French, German, Italian, Hebrew, Korean, and English. Her play "The Error" has been staged at the Tristan Bates Theatre, London, and at the New World Theater in Amherst, Massachusetts. Shibli is currently living in Berlin where she has a postdoctoral fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.