Ahmed Mansour Thursday, November 30, 2023 10:00 am
On this day, November 30, 2014, the writer passed away Radwa AshourAfter enriching the Arab Library with a number of books in the fields of stories, novels, and literary criticism, through its literary journey that lasted for more than thirty-seven years.
The great writer Radwa Ashour was born in 1946. She studied the English language at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, and after obtaining a master’s degree in comparative literature from the same university, she moved to the United States, where she obtained a doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, with a thesis on African-American literature.
Radwa Ashour published her first critical work in 1977, The Road to the Other Tent, about the literary experience of Ghassan Kanafani, and in 1978, she published in English the book Gibran and Blake, a critical study, which formed her thesis to obtain a master’s degree in 1972, and in 1980, her last critical work was published. Before entering the fields of novel and story, the title The Subaltern Rises, about the literary experiences of West Africa.
Her first creative work was the days of an Egyptian student in America (1983), which she followed by issuing three novels (A Warm Stone, Khadija, Sawsan, and Siraj) and the short story collection I Saw Palm Trees, in 1989. This phase culminated in the publication of her historical novel, the Granada Trilogy, in 1994, which, thanks to her, won, Best Book Award for the year 1994 on the sidelines of the Cairo International Book Fair.
At the beginning of the third millennium, Ashour returned to the field of literary criticism, where she published a collection of works dealing with the field of applied criticism, contributed to the Encyclopedia of Arab Writers (2004), and supervised the translation of the ninth part of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism (2005).
Between 1999 and 2012, she published 4 novels and one collection of short stories, the most important of which are the novel Al-Tantouriya (2011) and the collection of Mrs. Ra’a’s short stories.
Her journey in the world of creativity was crowned with many awards. In 1995, she won the Best Book Award for the year 1994 for the first part of the Granada Trilogy, on the sidelines of the Cairo International Book Fair, and in 1995 she won the first prize from the First Arab Women’s Book Fair for the Granada Trilogy, and in 2007 she won The Constantine Kavafis International Prize for Literature in Greece, and in 2009 she won the Terquinia Cardarelli Prize in Literary Criticism in Italy, and in 2011 she won the Pescara Bruzzo Prize for the Italian translation of the novel Specters in Italy, and in 2012 she won the Sultan Al Owais Prize for Novel and Story.
