Sonallah Ibrahim, The Egyptian Novelist Who Captured History
The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month, on August 13, 2025.
Several years ago, BULAQ discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart of one of Ibrahim’s most ambitious literary projects with scholar, editor and translator Hosam Aboul-ela. As Aboul-ela writes in his introduction to his new translation, Warda is someone who “somehow manages to embody both the historical and the unimaginable.”
Hosam Aboul-ela is a professor of English at the University of Houston and the editor of the Arabic list at Seagull Books, an award-winning Kolkata-based publisher. Warda is available, in Hosam Abou-ela’s translation, from Yale University Press, and Hosam’s translation of Sonallah Ibrahim’s Stealth is available from New Directions.
Also:
Read Ibrahim’s short story “Arsene Lupin,” translated by Emily Drumsta
A 2010 talk between Sonallah and Ursula Lindsey
On the Sonallah Ibrahim Renaissance, a conversation with Bruce Fudge
Sonallah Ibrahim’s Moscow: A Conversation with Margaret Litvin