Sammar is narrated in the third person, which means our access to her thoughts and motivations is always oblique, open to translation. However, the question of translation transcends their working relationship in the book.

Rae Isles is a lecturer in Middle Eastern History and Third World Politics, and Sammar is translating the work of an extremist group for him.

The protagonist of The Translator is Sammar, a Sudanese widow living in Aberdeen and working for a Scottish academic. Both Okri and Coetzee applaud the quiet anger and restraint which typifies the prose of Aboulela’s first three works: The Translator (1999), Coloured Lights (2001) and Minaret (2005). In her relatively short career, Leila Aboulela has established a significant reputation, winning several literary awards and receiving critical praise from two of Africa’s leading contemporary writers, Ben Okri and J.M. Leila Aboulela lives between Abu Dhabi and Aberdeen. She has also had several radio plays broadcast, including The Mystic Life (2003) and The Lion of Chechnya (2005). She is also the author of five novels: The Translator (1999) Minaret (2005), which tells the story of Najwa, an aristocratic Sudanese woman forced into exile in Britain Lyrics Alley (2010), set in 1950s Sudan and inspired by the life of her uncle - a poet and songwriter – The Kindness of Enemies (2015) and Bird Summons (2019).īBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part adaptation of The Translator in 2002, and a dramatisation of 'The Museum'. A collection of short stories, Coloured Lights, was published in 2001, followed by a second, Elsewhere, Home, in 2018, which won the award for Saltire Society's Fiction Book of the Year 2018. She has had several short stories published in anthologies and broadcast on radio, and one of her short stories, ‘The Museum’, won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. She worked as a part-time Research Assistant while starting to write.

She studied for a degree in Economics at Khartoum University, then moved to England to obtain a Masters degree in Statistics at the London School of Economics. Leila Aboulela was born in 1964 in Cairo and grew up in Khartoum.

Minaret leila aboulela sparknotes