Leila Aboulela

Leila Fuad Aboulela (Arabic:ليلى فؤاد ابوالعلا; born 1964) is a fiction writer, essayist, and playwright of Sudanese origin based in Aberdeen, Scotland. She grew up in Khartoum, Sudan, and in 1990 moved to Scotland, where she began her literary career. As of 2023, Aboulela has published six novels and several short stories, which have been translated into fifteen languages. Her most popular novels, Minaret (2005) and The Translator (1999) both feature the stories of Muslim women in the UK and were longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and Orange Prize. Aboulela's works have been included in publications such as Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Washington Post and The Guardian. BBC Radio has adapted her work extensively and broadcast a number of her plays, including The Insider, The Mystic Life and the historical drama The Lion of Chechnya. The five-part radio serialization of her 1999 novel The Translator was short-listed for the Race In the Media Award (RIMA).

Aboulela's work is critically acclaimed for its depiction of Muslim migrants in the West and the challenges they face. Her work is heavily influenced by her own experiences as an immigrant to the United Kingdom and the hardships she experienced during the transition. Her work centres on political issues and themes such as identity, multi-cultural relationships, the east–west divide, migration, and Islamic spirituality. Her prose has been celebrated by J. M. Coetzee, Ben Okri and Ali Smith. Her 2023 novel, River Spirit, was praised by Abdulrazak Gurnah for its "extraordinary sympathy and insight".

Aboulela was announced on 9 July 2025 as the winner of the PEN Pinter Prize, awarded annually by English PEN.

Early life and education

Born in 1964 in Cairo, Egypt, to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father, Aboulela moved at the age of six weeks to Khartoum, Sudan, where she lived continuously until 1987. Aboulela's father comes from a prominent Sudanese family – his cousin is poet Hassan Awad Aboulela – and he studied at Victoria College in Egypt and Trinity College, Dublin. Her mother was a statistics professor at the University of Khartoum and the first demographer in Sudan after earning a PhD in the subject from a university in London. Her multicultural upbringing was marked by summer vacations in Cairo, where she was able to form a connection with her mother's family and absorb Egyptian culture through food, popular media, and film. As a child she attended the Khartoum American School and the Sisters' School, a private Catholic high school. She described her education at the American School as one with "very few Sudanese pupils and no Sudanese teachers". Aboulela grew up speaking both English and Arabic; however, she recalls being the victim of bullying at school due to her use of colloquial Egyptian Arabic, which she learned from her mother.

Aboulela later attended the University of Khartoum, graduating in 1985 with a degree in economics. In 1991, she was awarded a Master of Science (M.Sc.) degree and a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in statistics from the London School of Economics. Her thesis is titled Stock and flow models for the Sudanese educational system.

Personal life

As of 2012, Aboulela lives in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her husband, Nadir Mahjoub, an oil engineer, is half-Sudanese, half-British, a younger brother of the novelist Jamal Mahjoub, and she counts among the influences on her writing his English mother, the late Judith Mahjoub. They have three children together. In 1990, Aboulela moved to Aberdeen with her husband and children, a move she cites as the inspiration for her first novel, The Translator. Aboulela began writing in 1992 while working as a lecturer at Aberdeen College and later as a research assistant at the University of Aberdeen. In 2006, she moved back to Khartoum to care for her ailing father, who died in 2008. Between 2000 and 2012, Aboulela lived in Jakarta, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha. Aboulela is a devout Muslim, and her faith informs much of her written work.

Literary career

Aboulela began writing at the age of 28, following a move to Aberdeen, Scotland, with her two young children spurred by her husband's work in the oil rigs. She began writing after enrolling in a creative writing course at the Aberdeen Central Library, where she was encouraged and supported by the writer-in-residence, Todd McEwen, who passed along Aboulela's work to his editor. Aboulela writes in English, a decision she dates back to her childhood, and notes that she chose to express herself in English because it was "a third language, refreshingly free from the disloyalty of having to choose between my father and my mother's tongues", in reference to Egyptian and Sudanese colloquial Arabic.

She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby, which compiles the work of 200 women writers of African descent. The anthology includes several genres such as autobiography, memoir, letters, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humour, journalism, essays and speeches.

In a 2023 interview, Aboulela expressed her views on African historical novels and her motivation for using sources written in African languages:

"Mainstream history has been written by the coloniser. This is their truth. It is time for us to tell ours. When Africans write history, we are not necessarily saying something about the world today. Much of the motivation comes from wanting to tell our side of the story. I am more excited by African historical novels than by any other genre."

Novels

The Translator: Originally published in 1999, The Translator, a Muslim retelling of Jane Eyre, is Aboulela's first novel. It tells the story of a Sudanese widow in Scotland who works as a translator and her relationship with her secular Scottish employer. In 2006, The Translator was listed by The New York Times as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.