Description
Bahiah Shaheen, an eighteen-year-old medical student and the daughter of a prominent Egyptian public official, finds the male students in her class coarse and alien. Her father, too, seems to belong to a race apart. Frustrated by her hardworking, well-behaved, middle-class public persona, her meeting with a stranger at a gallery one day proves to be the beginning of her road to self-discovery and the start of her realisation that fulfilment in life is indeed possible.'These two women live, to some degree, in every thinking woman.' New York Times Book Review'... an intensely told story ... A valuable opportunity to understand more clearly the currents of thought regarding women in a culture vastly different from the West.' Christian Science Monitor'At a time when nobody else was talking, [El Saadawi] spoke the unspeakable.' Margaret Atwood, BBC Imagine'The leading spokeswoman on the status of women in the Arab world' The Guardian'El Saadawi writes with directness and passion' New York Times'A poignant and brave writer' Marie Claire'El Saadawi has come to embody the trials of Arab feminism' San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Nawal El Saadawi (Arabic:نوال السعداوي) was born in 1931, in a small village outside Cairo. Unusually, she and her brothers and sisters were educated together, and she graduated from the University of Cairo Medical School in 1955, specializing in psychiatry. For two years, she practiced as a medical doctor, both at the university and in her native Tahla.From 1963 until 1972, Saadawi worked as Director General for Public Health Education for the Egyptian government. During this time, she also studied at Columbia University in New York, where she received her Master of Public Health degree in 1966. Her first novel Memoirs of a Woman Doctor was published in Cairo in 1958. In 1972, however, she lost her job in the Egyptian government as a result of political pressure. The magazine, Health, which she had founded and edited for more than three years, was closed down.From 1973 to 1978 Saadawi worked at the High Institute of Literature and Science. It was at this time that she began to write, in works of fiction and non-fiction, the books on the oppression of Arab women for which she has become famous. Her most famous novel, Woman at Point Zero was published in Beirut in 1973. It was followed in 1976 by God Dies by the Nile and in 1977 by The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World.In 1981 Nawal El Saadawi publicly criticized the one-party rule of President Anwar Sadat, and was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. She was released one month after his assassination. In 1982, she established the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, which was outlawed in 1991. When, in 1988, her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list, she and her second husband, Sherif Hetata, fled to the USA, where she taught at Duke University and Washington State University. She returned to Egypt in 1996.In 2004 she presented herself as a candidate for the presidential elections in Egypt, with a platform of human rights, democracy and greater freedom for women. In July 2005, however, she was forced to withdraw her candidacy in the face of ongoing government persecution.Nawal El Saadawi has achieved widespread international recognition for her work. She holds honorary doctorates from the universities of York, Illinois at Chicago, St Andrews and Tromso. Her many prizes and awards include the Great Minds of the Twentieth Century Prize, awarded by the American Biographical Institute in 2003, the North-South Prize from the Council of Europe and the Premi Internacional Catalunya in 2004. Her books have been translated into over 28 languages worldwide. They are taught in universities across the world.She now works as a writer, psychiatrist and activist. Her most recent novel, entitledAl Riwayawas published in Cairo in 2004.
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