Episode 8: Hadil Ghoneim

Our guest this week is Hadil Ghoneim.

Hadil Ghoneim

Hadil Ghoneim writes in Arabic and English. Her nonfiction essays and columns have appeared in Zone 3, Michigan Quarterly Review Online, Arab Lit Quarterly, Mada Masr, Shorouk, Al-Ahram and other print and online publications. She contributed to Beyond Memory: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction (2020) with her essay, “Baba and the Pontiac”.

Hadil has written many fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. Her book Layali Shahrzizi (The Nights of Shahrzizi) won the 2020 Etisalat Book of the Year award for Arabic Children’s Literature. Sisters Hana and Sheba was a finalist for best picture book for the same award in 2022 and was translated into Persian in 2024. Those Are Your Lenses, Abla was shortlisted for best storywriting in 2020 from the Children’s Books Publishers Forum. Her middle grade novella, Sana fi Qena (A Year in Qena) was a finalist for the Etisalat Award in 2014 and is on the IBBY Honor List. It continues to be used in schools, alongside the biographies she wrote of Naguib Mahfouz and Ahmed Zewail. Recently, she wrote song lyrics for the children’s album Afratta in a musical collaboration produced by Mophradat.