Radwa Ashour was an Egyptian novelist, translator, and professor of literature at Ain Shams University, Cairo, where she served as the head of the English department from 1990–1993. She obtained her BA and MA from Cairo University and graduated with a PhD in African-American Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. Throughout her education and career, Ashour was interested in political activism, human rights, and freedom, which are reflected in her literary oeuvres. She participated in student sit-ins and demonstrations in 1972, was involved in founding the National Committee Against Zionism in Egyptian Universities and helped establish the March 9 Group for University Autonomy which opposed the interference of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in academic affairs. Ashour’s literary writing revolves around sociopolitical predicaments of her time, with an interest in national and regional history. Palestinian resistance was of particular interest to Ashour’s writing, strengthened, perhaps, by her love affair and marriage to the late Palestinian poet Mourid al-Barghouti. Some of her finest work speaks to the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation, including her novel translated into English The Woman from Tantoura: A Novel from Palestine (2014). Ashour’s published writings include a series of novels, novellas, short stories, memoirs, autobiographical fiction, and academic studies.