Prof. Reem Bassiouney

Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics at the American University in Cairo since 2013, Reem Bassiouney is an Egyptian author and scholar. She previously held academic positions at Georgetown University, the University of Utah, and taught at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. She has also served on the judging panels of the Excellence in Literature Award (Supreme Council of Culture, 2024) and the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (2023). She holds a PhD and an MA in sociolinguistics from the University of Oxford, and a BA in English from Alexandria University. Widely acclaimed for both her scholarly and literary work, she is the author of several novels, many of which have been bestsellers and translated into English by Roger Allen. Several have received major literary prizes, including the Naguib Mahfouz Award and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Her work engages language, identity, and history, contributing significantly to contemporary Arabic literature and sociolinguistic studies worldwide today.