Hanan al-Shaykh

Born in Beirut to a Shi'a family, al-Shaykh was educated in Cairo and worked as a journalist in Beirut through the early 1970s before the civil war drove her to London, where she has lived since 1982. Her fiction returns again and again to the Lebanese war and to the lives of women — Lebanese, Saudi, Iraqi — caught between their families and a globalising Arab world.

Her best-known novels in translation are The Story of Zahra (1980), a startling first-person novel about a young woman who finds an unstable kind of agency in the chaos of wartime Beirut, and Women of Sand and Myrrh (1989), four interlinked monologues from women in an unnamed Gulf country. Beirut Blues (1992) returns to the war from the vantage of expatriate exile.

Her late-career memoir The Locust and the Bird (2009), built from her mother's oral testimony, is a quiet masterpiece of working-class Beirut life across the twentieth century; she has also produced a fresh, plain-spoken English-language version of One Thousand and One Nights for the Bloomsbury press, restoring stories that the Victorian translators had cut.