AUGUST 20, 2024 — Somaya Ramadan — a prominent literary critic, award-winning author, and translator of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — died Monday night. She was 73.
Ramadan, who was born in Cairo in 1951, didn’t publish her first novel, Leaves of Narcissus, until 2001, at the age of 50. The novel, which received both praise and a storm of criticism, won that year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature and was translated to English by Marilyn Booth. There is also a French translation by Stéphanie Dujols.
In an echo of Ramadan’s life, the protagonist travels west, to Ireland, for her education.
Ramadan earned a PhD in English literature from Trinity College in 1983 before returning to Egypt, where she worked as a teacher of English in the AUC’s Freshman Writing Program and was
Her first two books, published in the 1990s, were short-story collections. She also translated a number of works, the most prominent of which was A Room of One’s Own.
In her book Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Samia Mehrez quotes Ramadan on coming late to her novel:
The time had come when I could write about myself. The 1990s provided the time and the place for people to write about their individual selves. So I became more confident that what I had written would not be strange or improper. Maybe if I had published it earlier, it would have gone by unnoticed. There is always a point of congruence between the writer, the moment, and the context.
In their statement about the novel, the Naguib Mahfouz Medal judges wrote, “The novel is supremely complex, with modernist techniques pushed to the utmost, and thus maintaining all along a superb and vibrant creative tension. … Marked by a hallucinating and captivating narration, this is liminal writing par excellence: writing while gazing at the abyss of being.”
Ramadan, who was Bahai, also wrote a book about the principles of her faith and spoke out on the difficulties of being Bahai in contemporary Egypt.