About

Nashwa Nasreldin (Gowanlock) is a writer, editor, and literary translator of Arabic novels, short stories, poems, screenplays and non-fiction.

Her published book-length translations include the collaborative novel by nine refugee writers, Shatila Stories, which was long-listed for the 2019 EBRD literature prize and published by Peirene Press.

She is also the translator of After Coffee, by Abdelrashid Mahmoudi’s, winner of the 2014 Sheikh Zayed Literature award. The English edition was a ‘Fiction Finalist’ at the 2019 International Book Awards and was published by HBKU Press, formerly Bloomsbury-Qatar Foundation Publishing.

Her co-translation with Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp of Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria, was published by Rider Books, Penguin Random House. The French translation won France’s 2016 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger ‘Best Foreign Book prize’.

She writes poetry and literary essays, and is a freelance writer and commissioning editor of poetry, features and personal essays, with a focus on language, literature, history and current affairs, culture and the arts.

Nashwa is the website managing editor of arablit.org, a former programmes and documentaries producer at Al Jazeera English and a former video producer at Agence France Presse (AFP). She is the founder of the Suffolk-based Bury St Edmunds Writers’ Workshop.

Nashwa holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and was awarded a mentorship with the British Centre for Literary Translation in 2014.