Radwa Ashour

Radwa Ashour (رضوى عاشور) (26 May 1946 – 30 November 2014) was an Egyptian novelist.

Ashour was born in El-Manial to Mustafa Ashour, a lawyer and literature enthusiast, and Mai Azzam, a poet and an artist.

She graduated from Cairo University with a BA degree in 1967.

Between 1969 and 1980, Ashour's mainly focused on studying, raising her son and playing an active role as an activist.

She married Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti in 1970.

In 1972, she received her MA in Comparative Literature from the same university.

In 1975, Ashour graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a PhD in African American Literature.

Her dissertation was entitled The search for a Black poetics: a study of Afro-American critical writings.

While preparing for her PhD, Ashour was remarked as the first doctoral candidate in English who studied the literature of the African-American.

She taught at Ain Shams University, Cairo.

She gave birth to her son, poet Tamim al-Barghouti, in 1977.

In that same year, Ashour's husband, Mourid Barghouthi was deported from Egypt to Hungary.

As she and her son stayed in Cairo, they used to make frequent visits to Mourid.

From 1990 to 1993, she served as Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature in the Faculty of Arts at Ain Shams University, as well as teaching at the university and supervising research and dissertations related to her MA. degrees.

Between 1999 and 2012 she published four novels and one collection of short stories, the most important of which are the novel Tanturia (2011) and Lady Young's collection of anecdotal reports.

At the beginning of the third millennium, Ashour returned to the field of literary criticism, where she published a collection of works on the field of applied criticism, contributed to the Encyclopedia of the Arabic Writer (2004), and supervised the translation of the ninth part of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism (2005).

In 2007 she was awarded the Constantine Kwavis International Literary Prize in Greece, and in 2008 she published an English translation of Mrida El Barghouti's poetry anthology entitled

Midnight and Other Poems.

Mairead Barghouti, Radwa Ashour's husband, wrote many letters and poems expressing his sincere feelings for her and she, in turn, also exchanged love letters with him.

Active member of the following organizations:

In addition to her membership on a group of cultural and academic related arbitration committees:

Ashour died on 30 November 2014 after months of long-term health problems.

On 26 May 2018, Google Doodle commemorated Radwa Ashour's 72nd birthday.

Translated in Tamil by Dr. P. M. M. Irfan, August 2021