There is no shortage of remarkable contemporary Arab women writers; the difficulty is knowing where to begin and which translations to trust. The list below is built for a reader new to the field, with a deliberate spread across regions (Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, the Gulf, Algeria) and across forms (novel, short story, memoir).
If you read all twelve, you will know more about contemporary Arab women's writing than 99% of Anglophone readers.
The Story of Zahra
Beirut, the civil war, and one woman's wrecked agency. A short novel that reset the form for Arab women writers.
Woman at Point Zero
The most-translated Arabic feminist novel ever. Built from El Saadawi's real interviews with a condemned prisoner.
The Map of Love
A Booker-shortlisted English-language Egyptian novel that sweeps from colonial Cairo to the 1990s.
Granada
The best Arabic novel of the Andalusian aftermath; the first book of a celebrated trilogy.
Celestial Bodies
The first Arabic International Booker. Three Omani sisters and the long arrival of modernity in the Gulf.
Voices of the Lost
IPAF 2019. Letters across an exiled, broken, contemporary Arab world.
A Mountainous Journey
Memoir by the most important Palestinian woman poet of the twentieth century.
Memory in the Flesh
The best-selling Arabic novel by a woman; an Algerian war painter's obsession.
The Golden Chariot
A novel set in a women's prison in Cairo. Comic, harrowing, sociologically exact.
The American Granddaughter
An Iraqi-American interpreter during the occupation; one of the few novels willing to look at that role honestly.