Joyce Mansour

About

Joyce Mansour, born Joyce Patricia Adès, was an Egyptian-French surrealist poet renowned for her provocative and erotic poetry that challenged traditional norms. Born in England to a Jewish-Egyptian family of Syrian descent, she moved to Cairo as an infant. Her early life was marked by tragedy, including the death of her mother from cancer at age 15 and her first husband Henri Naggar six months after their 1947 marriage when she was 19. In 1949, she married Samir Mansour, a wealthy Cairo banker, with whom she had two sons and divided time between Cairo and Paris. She began writing poetry in English after personal losses but transitioned to French around her second marriage, encountering surrealism in Cairo through Georges Henein and later befriending André Breton in Paris after moving there in 1953.

Surrealist poetry blending eroticism, religious inversion, Egyptian mythology, and raw emotional intensity