Fadwa Tuqan

Born in Nablus to a notable Palestinian family, Tuqan was pulled out of school at thirteen and confined to the family compound after a rumour about a flower exchanged with a boy. She was educated, instead, by her older brother — the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, author of the Palestinian national anthem — who taught her the classical Arabic prosody from inside the house.

Her early collections are intimate, lyric, and concerned with the private grief of Palestinian women. After the 1967 occupation of Nablus her work turned increasingly political; her poems were quoted across the Arab world and Moshe Dayan is said to have remarked that "one of her poems is enough to create ten Palestinian guerillas." Her two-volume autobiography A Mountainous Journey is a landmark of Arabic women's prose.