Bakr's short fiction — collected in Maqam ‘Atiya and other volumes — and her novels The Golden Chariot (1991, set in a women's prison) and Wasf al-Bulbul (Description of the Nightingale) attend to the lives of women on the margins of Cairo: domestic servants, jailed women, sex workers, displaced peasants.
Recurring themes
working-class women in Cairo
prison literature
the short story as social document
the Egyptian historical novel
Selected works
- 1985Zinat at the President's Funeral
- 1991The Golden Chariot
- 1998The Man from Bashmour
- 2002The Long-Bearded Bachelor