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Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 and grew up in Khartoum. She graduated from the University of Khartoum and then studied for an MSc and an MPhil in Statistics at the London School of Economics. In 1990 she moved with her husband and children to Aberdeen where she started writing.  Leila’s two novels The Translator (1999) and Minaret (2005) were both longlisted for the Orange and the IMPAC prizes.  And The Translator was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her collection of short stories, Coloured Lights (2001) was short-listed for the PEN/ MacMillan Silver Pen Award and the book contains her story 'The Museum', which made her the first winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.  BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays including The Mystic Life (2003) and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya (2006).   Leila’s work has been translated into 12 languages. She lives in Abu Dhabi and is working on her third novel.

 “One of the few Muslim women writers in Britain to present their faith as a living force rather than discarded history, she also makes rich use of the tensions and ironies thrown up by her Anglo-Sudanese background.“ (The Independent)

“Her fiction grows out of an acute sense of geographical and cultural displacement and has won praise from Ben Okri and JM Coetzee” (The Observer).

Bibliography