A psychiatrist by training, El Saadawi was Egypt's Director-General of Public Health Education before being dismissed in 1972 over the publication of Al-Mar'a wa-l-Jins (Women and Sex), a frank book about female sexuality and female genital cutting. She was imprisoned by Sadat in 1981 and continued to write in jail on rolls of toilet paper smuggled out by another inmate.
Her novels — Woman at Point Zero (1975), God Dies by the Nile (1976), The Hidden Face of Eve (1977) — were among the first widely-translated Arabic books to put the lives of Arab women, in the village and the city, at the centre of the literary frame. She was a polarising figure inside Egypt, repeatedly accused of apostasy by religious courts, and a fixture of international feminist circuits until her death in 2021.
Recurring themes
Selected works
- 1958Memoirs of a Woman Doctor
- 1972Woman and Sex
- 1975Woman at Point Zero
- 1976God Dies by the Nile
- 1977The Hidden Face of Eve
- 1983Memoirs from the Women's Prison
- 1987The Fall of the Imam
