Nawal El Saadawi

El Saadawi trained and worked as a physician and psychiatrist in Egypt's rural health system before rising to become the country's Director of Public Health, a post she lost after publishing Women and Sex (1972), a nonfiction study of female genital mutilation and sexual repression that the government found too controversial to permit from a serving official.

She interviewed condemned women prisoners as part of her research, and Woman at Point Zero (1975) grew directly from one such encounter: a death-row prostitute's unrepentant account of the abuse, forced marriage, and exploitation that shaped her life, delivered without asking for the reader's pity. President Sadat imprisoned El Saadawi in 1981 for her political writing; she wrote Memoirs from the Women's Prison on smuggled toilet paper and an eyebrow pencil while jailed.

She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, faced death threats and government harassment for decades, and continued writing and speaking until her death in Cairo in 2021.