Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the novelist and commentator Adefsuef, an early traveler, she grew up mainly in Cairo but was a frequent and usually unhappy

visitor to Britain. Her adult life has been divided between the two cultures. She was the

first Muslim woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was in Tarria Square last year

witnessing the Arab Spring firsthand and commentating on the revolution.

If she had to locate her Englishness, she says it would be in literature, in the English

novels and poems I grew up with, but she adds that when she returns to Egypt, she feels as

though she's been holding her breath until she got there.

So Adif when you arrive back in Cairo now, when your feet touch Egyptian soil, what do you feel?

Well, my feet have been touching Egyptian Egyptian so often in the last year and a half

that really I've even stopped registering the changes. I wake up in the morning and

I'm not quite sure where I am until I'm completely alert.

I'd like to take you back then to, well very specifically to January the 28th of last year and you were at that time in Cairo you were walking through the streets

of Cairo was there almost tangibly a moment when you thought oh something

importance happening here?

Well, I think I thought that we all thought that actually on the 25th,

and I wasn't even in Egypt, I was in Jaipur at the literary festival,

I raced back and I got back on the 27th in the evening but

everything was quiet. It was like the country was drawing a breath and the next day on the 28th that's when it all completely broke

wide open and there was a moment when we were at the mouth of Tahrir and ahead of us in Tahrir there was the smoke and the gun fire and just thousands and thousands of people and every once in a

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