Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi was born on October 27, 1931, in the Nile Delta village of Kafr Tahla. Graduating in medicine from Cairo University in 1955, she specialized in thoracic medicine and psychiatry, rising to become Egypt’s Director General of Public Health Education. Her clinical encounters with women in rural villages and mental health wards exposed the traumatic consequences of female genital mutilation, forced child marriage, and domestic abuse.

In 1972, Saadawi published 'Women and Sex', an explosive sociological critique that cost her government post. Undeterred, she served as a United Nations advisor and founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982. In 1975, she published her fictional masterpiece 'Woman at Point Zero', based on her conversations with a woman on death row in Qanatir Women's Prison. Imprisoned in 1981 under President Anwar Sadat for political dissent, she famously wrote her prison memoirs using an eyeliner pencil and toilet paper. Facing assassination threats from religious extremists in the 1990s, she taught at Duke University and Washington State University before returning to Cairo to participate in the 2011 Tahrir Square revolution.