May Ziade

Marie Elias Ziade, known by her pen name May Ziade, was born in Nazareth to a Lebanese Maronite father and Palestinian mother. Relocating with her family to Cairo in 1908, she studied modern languages and philosophy, publishing daring feminist essays and biographies of pioneering Arab women under various pseudonyms.

For two decades, May Ziade hosted her legendary Tuesday literary salon in Cairo, attended by giants like Taha Hussein, Khalil Mutran, and Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad. She maintained an intense, purely epistolary romantic correspondence with Kahlil Gibran for nearly two decades without ever meeting him in person, standing as one of the most brilliant and tragic heroines of modern Arab letters.