Nawal El Saadawi

Nawal El Saadawi was born in Kafir Tahla in the Nile Delta and subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) at age six, a trauma that propelled her lifelong crusade against the practice. Graduating as a physician from Cairo University in 1955, she served as Egypt's Director General of Public Health Education. In 1972, she published Women and Sex, a courageous scientific denunciation of female subjugation and circumcision that caused the government to fire her and ban the magazine she founded.

Imprisoned in 1981 under Anwar Sadat for political dissent, Saadawi famously wrote her prison memoirs on toilet paper using an eyebrow pencil smuggled by a fellow inmate. Her gripping feminist novel Woman at Point Zero (1975) achieved worldwide acclaim. Despite assassination threats from religious extremists and forced exile in the 1990s, she returned to Egypt, actively joining youth in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution at age seventy-nine.