[5] While a substantial amount of her fiction has yet to be translated into English, her novel The Pistachio Seller was published by Syracuse University Press in 2009, and won the 2009 King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies Translation of Arabic Literature Award.

[8] Bassiouney won Sheikh Zaid Literature Award for her novel Al Halwani: The Fatimid Trilogy in 2024.

[9] Reem Bassiouney is the first Egyptian woman to earn her MA (1998) and PhD (2002) in linguistics from Oxford University in the UK, the first linguist to write a book on Arabic sociolinguistics in 2009, titled "Arabic Sociolinguistics” and covering topics such as gender, variation, politics, language policy, code switching, and diglossia, and the first woman to win the Naguib Mahfouz Literature Award from Egypt's Supreme Council for Culture in 2020.

She attended El Nasr Girls' College, and studied English literature at Alexandria University.

She was accepted for a graduate degree in linguistics at the University of Oxford, where she became a member of Somerville College.