Nawal El Saadawi was born in 1931, in a small village outside Cairo. Having studied medicine at the University of Cairo, she practised as a doctor and psychiatrist from 1955, and wrote her first book, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, in 1958. Five years later, her experience saw her appointed as Director General for Public Health Education – but after nine years of service, in 1972, she was removed from her post and the magazine she had founded, Health, was closed down.

After losing this post, Saadawi began to write both fiction and polemic about the oppression of Arabic women. Her two best known books were written during this period, and published in Beirut. The harrowing novel Woman at Point Zero appeared in 1973, and The Hidden Face of Eve, its non-fictional counterpart, was published in 1977. An outspoken critic of the Egyptian government of Anwar Sadat, Saadawi was imprisoned in 1981, and in 1988 her name appeared on a fundamentalist death list. She emigrated to the US with her husband Sherif Hetata, a novelist in his own right who has translated many of Saadawi’s works into English.

Saadawi continued writing, and saw many of her books translated into English and twenty-nine other languages. In 1996 she returned to Egypt, and in 2004 announced that she would run as a presidential candidate on a platform of human rights, democracy, and greater freedom for women. Government persecution led her to withdraw her candidacy. In 2007, she was threatened with the loss of her Egyptian citizenship by a case brought before the court by fundamentalist lawyer Saad Sharif. The State Council'sCourt of Administrative Justice threw the case out in May 2008, stating that citizens had the right to hold and profess dissident beliefs.

The work at the centre of Sharif’s case was a play entitled God Resigns at the Summit Meeting, which was considered unIslamic. Saadawi has written two other plays in Arabic, as well as her ten novels, most recently The Novel (2004); eight short story collections, six volumes of memoirs, and eleven volumes of non-fiction concerning women in the Arab world. Still active and acute, Saadawi toured the UK in 2007 courtesy of Zed Books, who reissued Woman at Point Zero, God Dies by the Nile and The Hidden Face of Eve. Several of her short stories collections are available in English from Methuen and a number of works are translated by Saqi, including Memoirs of a Woman Doctor and her 1993 novel Love in the Kingdom of Oil.