Samia Serageldin
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 nine 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. A third book, Love is Like Water & Other Stories, published in September, 2009, is partly set in Chapel Hill. In addition to fiction, Serageldin 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 and is heavily involved in promoting French/American cultural connections as vice-president of Alliance Française in the Triangle. Serageldin has a son in London, one in Los Angeles, and family and friends in Egypt, so she spends several months a year traveling. She lives in Chapel Hill with her husband.
