Both a radical and a contemplative figure, Radwa Ashour has been an important public intellectual and artist in Egypt since participating in the founding of the Higher National Committee for Writers and Artists in Cairo in 1973. Ashour was born in 1946, a short distance from the Abbas bridge at Manial where pro-British authorities crushed a student uprising. Although unaware of the events until her early adolescence, Ashour quickly became radicalised, insisting that her parents transfer her from a French colonial school to state school, and listening avidly to Nasser broadcasting on the radio.
After taking a degree in 1967, Ashour taught at Ain Shams, where she is still a professor of English and comparative literature, and by 1969 was part of a circle of Egyptian writers that included Bahaa Taher. As well as four books of literary criticism, Ashour co-edited the four-volumeEncyclopaedia of Arab Women Writers, 1873-1999, with Hoda El-Sadda from Egypt, Yumna El-Eid from Lebanon, Iman El-Qadi from Syria, Ferial Ghazoul from Iraq and Mohamed Barada from Morocco under the supervision of the late Latifa El-Zayyat and Emad Abu Ghazi. In 1970, she married Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti; their son, Tamim, is also a poet.
Ashour has written three collections of short stories and seven novels, of which the best known are her Granada trilogy which tell the story of the last years of the taifa state of Granada, the last outpost of al-Andalus (Islamic medieval Spain). Part I, Granada, won the Cairo International Book Fair Book of the Year award in 1994, and was published in English by Syracuse University Press.
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