Ahmad Al-Shahawy also spelled Ahmed Elshahawi or Ahmed El Shahawy was born in Damietta, Egypt, 1960,
Shahawy graduated from the Journalism Department, Sohag University, where he contributed to establishing a local newspaper. In 1985, he started working at the News Department of Al Ahram newspaper. He has been Managing Editor of NISF ELDUNIA – a weekly magazine published by Al-Ahram – since 1990. In 1991 he attended the International Writing Program in the United States. He was the recipient of UNESCO Literature Prize in 1995, and Cavafy Poetry Prize in 1998. In 2018, his poetry collection "I Do Not See Me" was nominated in the long list of the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the branch of Literature.
The Rotterdam International Poetry Festival published two collections of the poet's in English and Dutch in 2004. His poems have been translated into many languages including Turkish. Since 1987 he participated in many poetry festivals organized in many countries of the world.
His poetic work denotes a deep knowledge of the Sufi Muslim heritage, from the Arab Maghreb to the Persian one passing through Egypt. His poems fascinate for his innovation as well as for his modernity. Inspired in the Sufi poetic tradition, El-Shahavi takes up again the topics of his ancestors: the passion, the trascendency of human emotions, the captivating omniprescence of the Female Being. He gets inspired as usual in his present experience as an engaged poet, in a world consecrated to inhibition and to the denigration of pleasure due to the Other, the chosen being, subject and object unique and perfect of the loving state. He enjoys dismissing from the woman the sacrificed sensations due to this quasi-congenital shame that limits the legitimate flow of pleasure of the body. He digs the tongue to extirpate the "hidden". The spiritual message underlying in each one of El Shahawi´s works places his words in this refined level whose millennial strokes of the lovely feeling get to captivate the reader in modern times.
Some of his published works: Two Prayers for Love (1998), Conversations I-II (1991, 1994), States of the Lover (1996), Book of Death (1997), Say That it is Her (2000), Water in the Fingers (2002), The Commandments on the Love of Women I-II (2003, 2006), Tongue of the Fire (2005), One Gateway but So Many Abodes (2009), I Drive Clouds (2010), A Heaven in my Name (2013). The translation of his last book into Turkish was published by Kırmızı Yayınları in 2014. Deputies of God (2016) and I don't See Me (2018).
