Nawal El Saadawi: Writer, campaigner, feminist and fighting for social justice in Egypt

Nawal El Saadawi: Writer, campaigner, feminist and fighting for social justice in Egypt

Talk

Please note: This event took place in Oct 2015

The Bristol Festival of Ideas is pleased to present the celebrated writer Nawal El Saadawi to mark the launch of new editions of some of her classic works, published by Zed Books.

Her powerful and hypnotic novels - including Woman at Point Zero and God Dies By the Nile - tackle religion, love and female emancipation in the Middle East while her book The Hidden Face of Eve is a classic non-fiction account of female oppression in the Arab world, which was inspired by her experiences as a doctor in villages around Egypt. The Financial Times has described her as ‘The most influential feminist thinker in the Arab world over the past half-century.’ She talks about her work as a writer, her involvement in campaigns for women’s rights and social justice, and her life in Egypt.

Speaker biography:

Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world’s most influential feminist writers and activists. She is the author of over 50 books and short stories. In 1958 she was appointed Egypt’s Director of Public Health and spent many years touring villages in Egypt fighting to improve women’s health and education. In 1975 her classic novel Woman at Point Zero, one of the first feminist novels from the Middle East, was published and in 1981 she was imprisoned by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for her feminist activism. She was forced to flee Egypt in 1988 following threats from conservative Islamists. She returned to live in Cairo in 1996 and has lived there ever since. In 2011 she joined the protests which ousted Hosni Mubarak and she remains an indefatigable fighter for women’s rights and social justice.


× Close

Help us make our website work better for you

We use Google Analytics to gather information on how our website is used. This information helps us to make changes to our website that improve the usefulness and overall experience for our visitors. If you would like to help us to make continuous improvements to our website, please allow us to set "first-party" cookies (only readable by us) so that we can distinguish visitors and gain greater insights.

Allow cookies for analytics Deny cookies for analytics