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]

Basma Abdel Aziz
بسمة عبد العزيز
Born	1976 Cairo, Egypt
Nationality	Egyptian
Occupation(s)	Writer, psychiatrist, visual artist, human rights activist
Notable work	The Queue, Here Is A Body
Awards	Sawiris Cultural Award, English PEN Translation Award, Ahmed Bahaa-Eddin Award

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

• Contemporary Arabic literature
• Egyptian literature

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.