Walking Through Fire

In "A Daughter of Isis", Nawal El Saadawi painted a beautifully textured portrait of the childhood that moulded her into a novelist and fighter for freedom and the rights of women. "Walking Through Fire" takes up the story of her extraordinary life. Famous for her novels, short stories and writings on women, Saadawi is known as the first Arab woman to have written about sex and its relation to economics and politics. Imprisoned under Sadat for her opinions, she has continued to fight against all forms of discrimination based on class, gender, nationality, race or religion. This autobiography shows the passion for justice that has shaped her life and her writing. We read about her as a rural doctor, trying to help a young girl escape from a terrible fate imposed on her by a brutal male tyranny. We follow her attempts to set up women's organizations and to publish magazines later banned by the authorities or endangered by fundamentalist threats. We travel with her into exile after the publication of her name on a death list. We witness her first marriage to a freedom fighter hounded into drug addiction by a system that has no mercy. We share her struggle against her 'false self' and a second husband who offers her financial security and comfort - provided she stops writing. We live the beautiful moments of her third marriage with a man released after fourteen years of imprisonment and hard labour, and the love, companionship, shared struggle and the differences between them. Nawal El Saadawi has carved a place for herself in the universal struggle against oppression. 'Words should not seek to please, to hide the wounds in our bodies, or the shameful moments in our lives', she says. 'They may hurt, give us pain, but they can also provoke us to question what we have accepted for thousands of years'.

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'Her honesty, strength, courage, and accomplishments are admirable and inspiring' - Library Journal 'A moving repudiation of those who have made Egypt's history in the last century' - Washington Post Book World 'El Saadawi's poetic prose and searing details keep the pages alive with stories of triumph, dissent, death and disappointment' - San Francisco Chronicle 'Her [Dr. Nawal EL-Saadawi] autobiography is significant because it lays the central fight against terrorism' - Foreign Area Officer Association Journal (F.A.O.)

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Egyptian novelist, doctor and militant writer on Arab women's problems and their struggle for liberation, Nawal el Saadawi was born in the village of Kafr Tahla. Refusing to accept the limitations imposed by both religious and colonial oppression on most women of rural origin, she qualified as a doctor in 1955 and rose to become Egypt's Director of Public Health. Since she began to write over 30 years ago, her books have concentrated on women. In 1972, her first work of non fiction, Women and Sex, evoked the antagonism of highly placed political and theological authorities, and the Ministry of Health was pressurised into dismissing her. Under similar pressures she lost her post as Chief Editor of a health journal and as Assistant General Secretary in the Medical Association in Egypt. From 1973 to 1976 she worked on researching women and neurosis in the Ain Shams University's Faculty of Medicine; and from 1979 to 1980 she was the United Nations Advisor for the Women's Programme in Africa (ECA) and Middle East (ECWA). Later in 1980, as a culmination of the long war she had fought for Egyptian women's social and intellectual freedom, an activity that had closed all avenues of official jobs to her, she was imprisoned under the Sadat regime. She has since founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and devoted her time to being a writer, journalist and worldwide speaker on women's issues. With the publication by Zed Books in 1980 of The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, English language readers were first introduced to the work of this major writer. Zed Books has also published four of her previous novels, Woman at Point Zero (1983), God Dies by the Nile (1985), The Circling Song (1989) and Searching (1991) as well as a collection of her non-fiction writings The Nawal El Saadawi Reader (1997). She has received three literary awards.

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1. The Threat 2. Spreading My Wings 3. The Village Doctor 4. The Tripartite Invasion 5. What is Suppressed Always Comes Back 6. Love and Despair 7. My mother has no place in Paradise 8. Moments That Belong Nowhere 9. The Death Threat 10. Beyond Consciousness 11. The Photograph 12. The Scalpel and the Law 13. The Defeat 14. Searching For Love 15. An Aborted Revolution 16. The Dream Of Flying

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