Author Nadia Wassef on Life as a Cairo Bookseller

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Bookstores typically have been a place where I escape myself—and [a place where] I find a new self,” says this week's podcast guest, Nadia Wassef. “I feel like I walk in there and the world is open to me.” The author of the newly released Shelf Life: Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller knows a thing or two about bookstores: she co-founded Diwan—the Egyptian capital's leading bookstore—with her sister and friend back in 2002. We caught up with Nadia, who now lives in London, to talk about the power of the bookstore and the books within them, how she stays connected with Cairo, and what books she hopes travelers read before visiting her home country.

Read a transcription of the episode and find links to the books mentioned here: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/nadia-wassef-women-who-travel-podcast

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone and welcome to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Kondaynas Traveler.
0:09.0	I'm Lale Aricoglu and with me, as always, is my co-host Meredith Carey.
0:13.0	Hello!
0:14.0	It's been well documented that we love all things books here at Women Who Travel.
0:18.0	And this week we're chatting with Nadia Wassef, one of the
0:21.4	owners and co-founders of Duan, Egypt's first modern bookstore. Her book, shelf life, Chronicles of
0:27.3	the Cairo Bookseller, which is about running the store and a changing Egypt, came out last week.
0:32.2	Congrats on the book release and thanks for joining us, Nadia. Thank you for inviting me.
0:36.5	It's lovely to be with you.
0:38.2	So in the books prologue, it seems like the decision to start a bookstore, which is like
0:44.2	not a small feat at all, happened kind of in a snap.
0:48.9	What drove you to start the first store back in 2002?
0:54.6	Well, I think like most decisions that feel like they were snapped decisions,
0:59.2	when we look at them a bit more closely,
1:02.5	I think they kind of started a very long time ago.
1:06.0	And it has a lot to do with travel,
1:08.1	because I started thinking about my relationship to travel when you very
1:12.9	kindly invited me on this podcast and I realized something that travel for me has been about
1:21.7	exposure and it's been about exposure to other cultures and so from from when I was a teenager, and I think I
1:30.3	complain about this in the book, my mother used to take us on all these trips, and it was every
1:35.8	summer. And I'm a teenager. It's summer. It's the 80s, you know. And the last thing I want
1:41.7	to do is visit museums and art galleries and theatres.
	...

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