Ahdaf Soueif on what it means to write with and from conscience.
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This piece was commissioned by Charleston and English PEN for “A Matter of Conscience”, an event at Charleston Festival 2026 on 16 May 2026, with Reni Eddo-Lodge, Alice Oswald and Ahdaf Soueif.
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It seems now, rightly, that every person with a conscience is asking themselves what they can do.
So what is it that the writer can – uniquely – do? As we live through our day, as we eat, dress, wash, as I try to write this piece children are being amputated, orphaned. Cities are reduced to rubble, the land and the rivers poisoned, norms and laws dismantled, institutions corrupted to make more room for war. I cannot speak for the poet, but in a time of urgency the writer of fiction cannot afford the time and the attention needed by the process of prospecting and excavating and coaxing and tweaking that will – maybe – yield the story.
The answer for some of us has been to walk away from our small quarry and join the good and humbling company of citizens of the world, from young direct-action activists to pensioner protestors, from dockers to doctors to students to lawyers to journalists to academics, to musicians and actors, why even to – a few – politicians, all speaking truth to power, all using what tools they possess to hold off or to mitigate or document the unfolding catastrophe.
What do we bring to the company?
There is a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that says: ‘If one of you should see an instance of wrongdoing let them change it with their hand, and if they cannot then with their tongue, and if they cannot then with their hearts, and that is the least you can do.’
We, the writers, are the ones entrusted with words.
In 2006, Mahmoud Darwish, responding to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, wrote a ‘Diary’ in the Palestinian literary magazine, al-Karmel. It takes the form of 15 short pieces of prose and poetry. This is piece number 5:
Smoke rises from me / I reach out a hand to collect my limbs scattered from so many bodies / besieged from land and sky and sea and language./ The last plane has taken off from Beirut airport and left me in front of the screen to watch / with millions of viewers / the rest of my death / As for my heart, I see it roll / like a pinecone, from Mount Lebanon, to Gaza.
Yet Darwish, even Darwish with his genius for the word, two years later when he addressed the first season of the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest, spoke of the difficulty of the Palestinian writer who ‘has to use the word to resist the military occupation, and has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the repetitive.’
And as the years and the massacres and the years and the displacements and the years and the injustices have rolled on, the ‘difficulty’ for all of us has taken root and bloomed. So what do we bring to the table? A reputation perhaps? a readership? and any facility we may have with words in quotidian use. And the hope that one day the world will be such that we will once again have space to mine our hearts, to coax out precious fragments and fashion them into the patterns that speak to those who see them and find an echo in their hearts.
Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into more than 30 languages). Her account of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Cairo: a City Transformed, came out in January 2014. Her collection of essays, Mezzaterra (2004), has been influential and her articles for the Guardian in the UK are published in the European and American press. In 2007 Ms Soueif co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature which takes place annually in occupied Palestine.
Among other honours, Ms Soueif was awarded the first Mahmoud Darwich Award in 2010 and the European Culture Foundation Princess Margriet Award in 2019. In 2020, after serving for 7 years, she resigned from the British Museum Board of Trustees.
