Basma Abdel Aziz

Basma Abdel Aziz (Arabic: بسمة عبد العزيز, born 1976 in Cairo, Egypt) is an Egyptian writer, psychiatrist, visual artist and human rights activist, nicknamed 'the rebel'.[1] She lives in Cairo and is a weekly columnist for Egypt's al-Shorouk newspaper. She writes in Arabic, and her novels The Queue and Here Is A Body were published in English. For her literary and nonfiction work, she was awarded the Sawiris Cultural Award and other distinctions.[2]

Life and career

Born in Cairo, Abdel Aziz holds a B.A. in medicine and surgery, an M.S. in neuropsychiatry, and a diploma in sociology. She works for the General Secretariat of Mental Health in Egypt's Ministry of Health and the Nadeem Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture.[3]

As a writer, Abdel Aziz gained second place for her short stories in the 2008 Sawiris Cultural Award, and a 2008 award from the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces. Her sociological examination of police violence in Egypt, Temptation of Absolute Power, won the Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award in 2009.[4]

Her debut novel Al-Tabuur (The Queue) was first published by Dar al-Tanweer in 2013,[4] and Melville House published an English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette in 2016.[5] In 2017, this satirical novel won the English PEN Translation Award.[6] For its dystopian representation of injustice, torture and corruption, it has been compared by the New York Times to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Trial by Franz Kafka. The novel has also been published in Turkish, Portuguese, Italian and German translations.[7]

In 2016, she was called one of Foreign Policy 's Leading Global Thinkers.[8] In 2018, she was named by The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute as one of top influencers of Arabic public opinion.[9] Her 2018 novel Here is a body, translated by Jonathan Wright, was published in English in 2011 by Hoopoe, an imprint of American University of Cairo Press.[10]

Works

Fiction
  • May God Make it Easy, 2008
  • The Boy Who Disappeared, 2008
  • Al-Tabuur (The Queue), 2013
  • Hona Badan (Here Is A Body), 2018
  • The blueberry Years (Aawam Al touts), 2022

Non-fiction
  • Temptation of Absolute Power, 2009
  • Beyond Torture, 2011
  • Memory of Repression, 2014
  • The Power of the Text, 2016

See also

Further reading
  • John C. Hawley: Coping with a failed revolution: Basma Abdel Aziz, Nael Eltoukhy, Mohammed Rabie & Yasmine El Rashidi. In: Ernest N. Emenyonu (ed.): Focus on Egypt. Boydell & Brewer, Suffolk 2017, pp. 7–21. DOI: https://doi-org.uaccess.univie.ac.at/10.1017/9781787442351.003.
  • Lindsey Moore: ‘What happens after saying no?’ Egyptian uprisings and afterwords in Basma Abdel Aziz's The Queue and Omar Robert Hamilton's The City Always Wins. In: CounterText 4/2. 2018, pp. 192–211.

References
  1. Mohammed Shoair, Basma Abdul Aziz: The Ever-Ready Egyptian Rebel Archived 2018-02-07 at the Wayback Machine, Al-Akhbar English, March 28, 2012. Accessed March 9, 2018.
  2. "Curtis Brown". www.curtisbrown.co.uk. Retrieved 2018-03-17.
  3. Daum, Rachael (2015-12-29). "Basma Abdel Aziz: 'The Worst Thing Is That Publishers Are Scared, Too'". ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly. Archived from the original on 2015-12-29. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
  4. New release: 'The Queue' by Basma Abdel-Aziz, Ahram Online, 27 Feb 2013.
  5. The Queue. Melville House. 2016. ISBN 9781612195162.
  6. "Basma Abdel Aziz". Words Without Borders. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
  7. ""In fiction one is always allowed to break rules"". AUCPress. 2021-07-29. Archived from the original on 2021-08-20. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
  8. "Shubbak: Basma Abdel Aziz in conversation with Jo Glanville - English PEN". English PEN. Retrieved 2018-03-17.
  9. "Basma Abdel Aziz - Global Influence". Global Influence. Archived from the original on 2020-10-31. Retrieved 2018-03-17.
  10. ""In fiction one is always allowed to break rules"". Hoopoe. 2021-07-28. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
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