March 30, 2010, Chennai, 6pm - 8 pm

Commemorating 25 years of Feminist Publishing

Women Unlimited in collaboration with Prakriti Foundation present

Common Ground: A dialogue between Ahdaf Soueif and Radwa Ashour on Literature and Politics through Arab Women's Writings

Venue: Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan, 4, Rutland Gate, 5th Street, Chennai 600 006

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestseller, The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into more than 20 languages) the well-loved, In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. She 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 occupies a unique position among contemporary writers: Egyptian and British, writing in both English and Arabic, concerned with both the art of fiction and the state of the world, she works at several crossroads. In 2007 she founded Engaged Events, a UK based charity. Its first project being, The Palestine Festival of Literature, which took place in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Jenin and al-Khalil/Hebron in 2008 and 2009. She was recently presented with the Mahmoud Darwish Award in Palestine.

Radwa Ashour has published several novels and collections of short stories. Part I of her Granada Trilogy won the Cairo International Book Fair '1994 Book of the Year Award'; the Trilogy won the First Prize of the First Arab Woman Book Fair (Cairo, 1995). Several of her works have been translated into Spanish, English, Italian, French and German. Ashour has co-edited a major 4-volume work on Arab women writers, and an abridged English translation: Arab Women’s Writings: A Critical Reference Guide: 1873-1999. Ashour has also co-translated and edited the Arabic translation of Vol. 9 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, and translated Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight and Other Poems. She was awarded the 2007 Constantin Cavafy Prize for Literature.

Women Unlimited, a non-profit trust, is an associate of Kali for Women, India’s first and oldest feminist press, which publishes scholarly and academic books in the social sciences; fiction; general interest non-fiction; books for young adults; pamphlets and monographs; and activist material.