The protagonist of her latest novel seems to have much in common with its author. al-Tahawy began going out to the neighborhood cafes early each day, where she, too, would write. So after the long absence from her craft, Ms. Everywhere she went, she saw people writing. “That is part of the connection with exile.”ĭivorced from her poet husband, she moved into a tiny apartment in an ethnically diverse community in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I spent long periods in the beginning where I did not know how to smile,” she said during a recent interview in Cairo, reflecting on the loneliness of her new American surroundings. In 2008, after her mother’s death, she packed her belongings and those of her son, then 8, into just two suitcases and traveled to New York for a post-doctoral fellowship that she had put on hold, beginning a productive era of her life. During this time, she reconnected with siblings, acquaintances, childhood friends, and her proud Arab Bedouin origins. For more than two years, she slept in her childhood room and cared for her cancer-stricken mother. CAIRO - The Egyptian novelist Miral al-Tahawy withdrew from the international literary and cultural scene in 2006 and returned at age 37 to the Nile Delta village of her birth.
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