Biographical Information

Nawal El Saadawi

Sherif Hetata

Nawal El Saadawi
Curriculum Vitae and List of Books (2005)


Professional Experience:

Visiting Professor
Duke University, 1993- 1996
University of Washington, Seatt1e, 1995
University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998, Florida Atlantic University 1999
Montclair State University 2001-2002
University of Southern Maine January to December 2003
University Autonoma at Barcelona Spain 2004
Smith College Northampton MASS. USA Autumn 2004
Claremont Graduate School , California USA Spring 2005
Head of Women’s Program in the UN – ECA, Addis Ababa, 1978-1979; UN -ECA, Beirut, 1978 -1980
Author in the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo, 1974 -1978
Director General of the Health Education Department, Ministry of Health, Cairo, 1966- 1972
Medical Doctor, University Hospital and Ministry of Health, 1955–1965

Activities:

Founder and President, Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA), 1982- Present Founder, Noon Magazine, 1989-1991 and Health Magazine 1968-1973
Co–Founder, Arab Association for Human Rights, 1983-1987
Founder Vice-President, African Association for Women on Research Development, Dakar, Senegal, 1977 -1987
President and Organizer, International Conference on the Challenges Facing Arab Women, Cairo, September, 1986, and other international conferences of AWSA, 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1997, 1999, 2002 and 2005 in Cairo.
Founder, Health Education Association and Chief Editor, Health Magazine, Cairo, Egypt, 1968-1974 Founder, Egyptian Women Writer's Association, 1971
Secretary General of Medical Association, Cairo, Egypt. 1968-1972
Editor of Medical Association Magazine, 1968-1972

AWARDS

Honorary Doctorate, University of York, United Kingdom, 1994
Honorary Doctorate, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1996
Honorary Doctorate, University of St. Andrews-Scotland, 1997
First Degree Decoration of the Republic of Libya, 1989
Literary Award of Gubran, (Arab Association of Australia Award), 1988
Literary Award by the Franco-Arab Friendship Association, Paris, France, 1982
Literary Award by the Supreme Council for Arts and Social Sciences, Cairo, Egypt, 1974
XV Premi International Catalunia Award, 2003
Honorary Doctorate Degree, University of Tromso, Norway, 2003
International Writer of the Year for 2003, nominated by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England
Great Minds of the 21st Century Award, American Biographical Institute,
North Carolina , USA, 2003
North South Prize 2004, the Council of Europe (Lisbon, 25 October 2004 )
Inana International Prize , Brusselles Belgium 2005

PUBLICATIONS:

All originals in Arabic. Most have been translated into 30 languages, including English, French, German. Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Indonesian, Japanese, Iranian, Turkish, Urdu, Thai, and others.

FICTION:

NOVELS (in Arabic)
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (Cairo, 1958)
The Absent One (Cairo, 1969)
Two Women in One (Cairo, 1971)
Woman at Point Zero (Beirut, 1973)
The Death of the Only Man on Earth (Beirut, 1975)
The Children's Circling Song (Beirut, 1976)
The Fall of the Imam (Cairo, 1987)
Ganat and the Devil (Beirut, 1991)
Love in the Kingdom of Oil (Cairo, 1993)
THE NOVEL (Cairo, 2004 )

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS (in Arabic)

I Learnt Love (Cairo, 1957)
A Moment of Truth (Cairo, 1959)
Little Tenderness (Cairo, 1960)
The Thread and the Wall (Cairo, 1972)
Ain El Hayat (Beirut, 1976)
She was the Weaker (Beirut, 1977)
Death of an Ex-minister (Beirut, 1978)
Adab Am Kellat Adab collection (Cairo, 2000)

PLAYS (in Arabic)

Twelve Women in a Cell (Cairo, 1984)
Isis (Cairo, 1985)
God Resigns in The Summit Meeting (1996)

NON-FICTION

MEMOIRS (in Arabic)
Memoirs in a Women's Prison (Cairo, 1983)
My Travels Around the World (Cairo, 1986)
Memoirs of a Child Called Soad (Cairo, 1990) ( 1944 )
My Life, Part I, Autobiography (Cairo, 1996)
My Life, Part II, Autobiography (Cairo, 1998)
My Life, Part III (2001)

BOOKS (in Arabic)

Women and Sex (Cairo, 1969)
Woman is the Origin (Cairo, 1971)
Men and Sex (Cairo, 1973)
The Naked Face of Arab Women (Cairo, 1974)
Women and Neurosis (Cairo, 1975)
On Women (Cairo, 1986)
A New Battle in Arab Women Liberation (Cairo, 1992)
Essays: El Ma`ara Wa lguorba (Cairo, 1997)
Essays: Taw`am el Sulta Wa l guins (Cairo, 2001)
Essays: Kadaya el Ma`ara wa l Fikr (Cairo, 2002)
Essays: Kasr El Hedoud (Cairo, 2004)
Fiction and Non-Fiction (Cairo, 2004)
BOOKS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH
The Hidden Face of Eve [study] (London: Zed Books, 1980)
Woman at Point Zero [novel] (London: Zed Books, 1982)
God Dies by the Nile [novel] (London: Zed Books, 1984)
Circling Song [novel] (London: Zed Books, 1986)
The Fall of the Imam [novel] (London: Methuen, 1987)and Saqi Books 2001
Searching [novel] (London: Zed Books, 1988)
Death of an Ex-minister [short stories] (London: Methuen, 1987)
She Has No Place in Paradise [short stories] (London: Methuen, 1987)
My Travels Around the World [non-fiction] (London: Methuen, 1985)
Memoirs from the Women's Prison [non-fiction] (London: Women's Press, 1985; University of California Press, 1995)
Two Women in One [novel] (London: Al-Saqi Books, 1992)
Memoirs of a Woman Doctor [novel] (London: Al-Saqi Books, 1992; City Lights, USA, 1993)
The Well of Life [two novellas] (London: Methuen, 1992)
The Innocence of the Devil [novel] (London: Methuen, 1994; University of California Press, 1995)
Nawal El Saadawi Reader [non-fiction essays] (London: Zed Books, 1997)
Part I – Autobiography (Zed Books, London, 1999) “A Daughter of Isis”.
Part II Walking through Fire (Zed Books, London, 2002)
Love in the Kingdom of Oil [novel], (Saqi books, London, 2001)

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Nawal El Saadawi is a novelist, a psychiatrist, and a writer who is well known both in the Arab countries and in many other parts of the world. Her novels and her books on the situation of women have had a deep effect on successive generations of young women over the last 4 decades.

As a result of her literary and scientific writings she has had to face numerous difficulties and even dangers in her life. In 1972 she lost her job in the Egyptian government. The magazine, Health, which she had founded and edited for more than three years, was closed down. In 1981 President Sadat put her in prison. She was released one month after his assassination. From 1988 to 1993 her name figured on death lists issued by some fanatical terrorist organizations. She lived in exile for five years. In 2001 she won her case in Cairo court against forceful divorce from her husband (according to Hisba law). In 2004 Al Azhar in Cairo banned her novel, The Fall of the Imam. Her new Novel entitled Al Riwaya ( in Arabic ) published in Cairo by Dar Al Hilal October 2004 was banned by Al Azhar and Church in Egypt .

On June 15, 1991, the government issued a decree that closed down the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, over which she presides, and handed over its funds to the association called Women in Islam. Six months before this decree, the government closed down the magazine Noon, published by the Arab Women's Solidarity Association. She was editor-in-chief of this magazine.

Nawal El Saadawi has been awarded several national and international literary prizes, and has lectured in many universities and organized and participated in many international and national conferences, the latest one was the 7 th International conference of the Arab Women`s Solidarity Association ( AWSA ) under the title Creativity , Dissidence and Women held in Cairo 21 to 23 May 2005 . Her works have been translated into many languages all over the world, and some of them are taught in a number of universities and colleges in different countries.

On 8 December 2004 she presented herself as a candidate for the presidential elections in Egypt . You can visit her web site : www.nawalsaadawi.net to see her electoral program in English and Arabic as well as other information regarding her different political and literary activities .

عن نوال السعداوى ومؤلفاتها الأدبية والفكرية

القاهرة / يناير 2006

(1) نبذة قصيرة

بدأت نوال السعداوى الكتابة فى سن مبكرة وهى فى المدرسة الثانوية ، عام 1944 ، وقدمت للمكتبة العربية أربعين كتابا ، ما بين الرواية ، والقصة القصيرة ، والمسرحية ، والسيرة الذاتية ، والدراسات العلمية والفكرية فى مجال الأدب والإبداع والسياسة والطب النفسى ، والأخلاق ، والدين ، وقضايا تحرير النساء والرجال فى المجتمع المصرى والعربى .

مارست نوال السعداوى الطب (فى مجال جراحة الصدر ثم المجال الباطنى والنفسى) وجمعت بين الطب والأدب ، وشاركت فى تأسيس عدد من المنظمات الأدبية والنسائية .

تُرجمت أعمالها الى ثلاثين لغة فى العالم ، وحصلت على جوائز أدبية متعددة ، وعلى الدكتوراه الفخرية من عدد من جامعات العالم .

(2) موجز لأهم أعمال نوال السعداوى

أ) الروايات :

ب) المذكرات والسيرة الذاتية :

جـ) مجموعات القصص القصيرة :

د) مسرحيات :

هـ) المؤلفات العلمية والفكرية :

Sherif Hetata

Sherif Youssef Hetata is a novelist and medical doctor. He is married to Nawal El Saadawi and has two children. He occupied various posts and functions since he graduated from the medical college with honors in 1946. These included a period of eight years with the International Labour Organization in Asia, then in Africa. During that period he was Head of a Team of Experts on Population and Migration.

He has written on many subjects including travel, politics and health, but since 1968 has devoted himself to novels. He has translated some of his own works as well as some of the works of Nawal El Saadawi into English. He was Assistant Editor of the magazine, Health, in the early 1970s and of the feminist magazine, Noon, in the early nineties.

He has travelled extensively in Europe, Africa, Asia and the United States, and has participated in many conferences and carried out lecture tours in various countries.
In Egypt he was a member of the Board of the Medical Syndicate and participated in founding the Association for Health Education in 1969, and the Arab Women's Solidarity Association in 1982. He speaks and writes Arabic, English and French fluently.
He worked for nine years in the Egyptian government service. First in the Ministry of Health planning and organizing primary health care services in rural areas, then in the planning department of the public sector drug industry, and lastly in the Supreme Council for Population and Family Planning. During the last period he attended several regional conferences on population and migration, spent three months at Chicago University in an exchange program, and participated in negotiations with the World Bank.

Half of his period with the ILO was spent in Asia and the other half in Africa.
In Asia he was based in New Delhi and was responsible for developing projects on population and migration with the concerned government authorities in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He travelled extensively especially in India where he visited most of the states. He worked closely with high level government officials, parliamentarians, university professors, research institutes, political parties, trade unions and non-governmental organization. During this period he also travelled to Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines. Many of these travels and experiences are reflected in his book, "The Way of Salt and Love." During this period ten projects related to population and migration were developed, and assisted by his office in the ILO. In Africa he was based in Addis Ababa and travelled extensively in Saharan Africa where he visited twelve countries in both the Eastern, Southern and Western parts of the continent.
He worked for several years at the head of a task force in the Egyptian Medical Syndicate on policies and plans related to primary health care and health insurance and his professional experience in this area was reflected in his book, "Health and Development." (Dar El Maaref Publishing House, 1968.)

There are many reviews of his works in the Arabic press and some in the English press but these are documented at home in Egypt.

He has attended several international writers' conferences in Helsinki, London, Johannesburg, and Copenhagen. He received the Gold Medal of the Faculty of Medicine in Physiology. He has lectured in many universities including Cambridge, Norwich, Sussex, London, Amsterdam, Harvard, North Carolina State University, Chicago University and others. He has given public lectures in many countries of the world and has taught for two semesters at Duke University, and one semester at the University of Washington in Seattle. The courses were on creativity, resistance literature and the Arab World and Women.

Dr. Saadawi and Dr. Hetata were also members of the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal, that investigated war crimes against Iraq. Text of the investigation could be found at:

WAR CRIMES: A Report on United States War Crimes Against Iraq to the Commission of Inquiry for the International War Crimes Tribunal