About the Author

Born and raised in Egypt in a political family persecuted under the Nasser regime, Samia Serageldin left at the age of twenty to study at London University, where she earned a Master’s in Political Science. In the early eighties she immigrated to the United States, and lived in Michigan and Massachusetts before moving to North Carolina twenty years ago.

Her autobiographical first novel, The Cairo House, was published in 2000 and translated into ten foreign languages. Her second novel, The Naqib's Daughter, about Napoleon's expedition to Egypt in 1798, was published in February 2009 by Fourth Estate UK. Her most recent book, Love is Like Water & Other Stories, is partly set in Chapel Hill, NC. Her fiction has been extensively anthologized.

In addition to fiction, she has published essays on Islam, women, Arab American writing, and counter-terrorism, most recently in Muslim Networks (UNC Press) and In the Name of Osama bin Laden (Duke Press). Apart from writing, everything she does is linked to words: she taught both French and Arabic, most recently at Duke University, and wrote a regular literary review column for The Chapel Hill News for many years. She is an active public speaker on current events in the Middle East.

Samia is an editor of the online quarterly magazine South Writ Large: Stories, Arts and Ideas from the Global South. 

Samia has two adult sons. She often visits extended family and friends in Egypt, and was in Cairo when the January 25th Revolution broke out. She participated in the historic events of Tahrir Square, a unique experience captured in the first-hand account of the revolution she is currently in the process of writing.