Nadia Wassef
Author
Books
Books
On International Women’s Day in 2002, Nadia and her sister, Hind, co-founded Diwan, a small corner bookstore in Cairo. Over the last twenty years, it has grown into Egypt’s fiercely independent leading chain of bookstores, with 10 branches, and a publishing house.
Before cofounding Diwan, Nadia worked in research and advocacy for the Female Genital Mutilation Taskforce and the Women and Memory Forum. Her work as a bookseller, entrepreneur, and women’s rights activist, has been covered in the Washington Post, Time, Monocle, and Business Monthly, among other publications.
Nadia was the recipient of the 2022 Woman of The Year Award (UNICEF & Look! Magazine) under the category of “Woman for Women.” She has also been on Forbes Magazine’s “200 Most Powerful Women in the Middle East” for three years running (2014-2016). And in 2011 Nadia was the recipient of Veuve Clicquot’s Initiative for Economic Development.
She holds three M.A. degrees—one in English & Comparative Literature from the American University in Cairo (1996), the second in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2000), and the third in Creative Writing from Birkbeck, University of London (2017).
She has also co-edited with her sister the first photographic collection of Egyptian women entitled, Daughters of the Nile: Photographs of Egyptian Women’s Movements, 1900-1960 (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2001).
Nadia is the author of Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), also published in the United Kingdom as Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller (Corsair, 2022). It is currently being translated into 11 languages.
She lives in London with her two daughters and Cleo, the stubborn French bulldog.
Praise for Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller:
“Shelf Life is a moving portrait of Diwan and the Cairo that embraced it, an ode to all the people who have kept it going.”
—Virginia Marshall, Harvard Review
"The richness of Wassef’s debut makes it a hard one to categorize...Diwan is the central character in a compelling narration that is also a cultural history, a diary of an entrepreneur, a catalogue of the best of Egyptian literature, and a commentary on living and leading as women in a contemporary Egypt turbulent with change.”
—Katie Hurlbut Coleman, Chicago Review of Books
“Wassef’s sarcastic, no-nonsense voice . . . seizes the reader by the ear.”
—M. Lynx Qualey, Middle East Eye
Washington Independent Review of Books
“[Wassef] packs an entire library’s worth of subjects into this captivating memoir.”
—Jennifer Bort Yacovissi, Washington Independent Review of Books