Sahar Tawfiq
Sahar Tawfiq was born at Maadi, south of Cairo. She was graduated from Al-Azhar University at 1975. At the same year, she married Adel el Sharqawi, who was a sculupture. They lived at Pyramids and got two sons. Her husband died at 1995, and now she is living with her sons and parents at Maadi, working in the ministry of education.
Sahar Tawfiq published her first story at 1971, her first book, That the Sun May Sink, came at 1984. The second book, in english, Points of the Compass, a number of her stories translated by Marilyn Booth, and was published by Arknsas University press (1994), winning it's Award for Arab Literature in Translation.
At her first book, Sahar Tawfiq is expressing her vision of life from the view of Egyptian woman, who suffers the whole modern life problems, specially what the modern Egyptians have went through in the modern age. She uses the Egyptian legacy, and the popular culture, in portraying her stories images.
In the year 2000, Tawfiq published her first novell, Taam el Zaiton (The Tast of Olives). At the same year she published her translation for two books. The first is The Pasha's Peasants, by the American historian Kenneth Kuno. And the second is a group of Brasilian short stories, which she translated in participation with the Egyptian writer and translator Khalil Kalfat.
In Taam el Zaitoon, Tawfiq builds an imagined world, a village at somewhere, at sometime, but it is an Egyptian village, expieriencing the patriarchy system in life, embodied in a family of brothers enherit their father and pointing their eldest as the "Warith el Abaia". The first person at the novell, a young woman "Al Warraqa", who always asks about every wrong in the society, suffers all the agony of the conspiracy which lead to her being ripped, and killed. But, her body goes flaoting on the river Nile, never come to shore. She emodies the human who stands against the received notions, trying to call for freedom and thinking. Sahar Tawfiq still, in this novell too, takes her imagination from Egyptian and popular Egyptian legacy..
Sahar Tawfiq has now two books coming soon, a novell, and a group of short stories. At the same time she is working in translating Bayram el Tonsi's Egypt, by Marilyn Booth.
