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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]
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]
