![]() The book criticised female genital mutilation and other offences on women’s bodies, such as the women (dayas) in villages who do ‘virginity’ testing on brides on their wedding night by breaking the hymen. Her first nonfiction book Women and Sex, published in 1972, was banned and she lost her job as Director of Public Health at the Ministry of Health in Egypt due to its content. After years working as a doctor in poor villages in Egypt, Nawal changed tack and became a psychiatrist. She wrote her first book – Diary of a Child Called Souad – at 13, but didn’t consider writing a viable career choice then, so she trained as a doctor, going on to become a chest surgeon. Nawal doesn’t see a difference between fiction and autobiography in her writing, presumably because her life has, at every stage, been stranger than fiction. ![]() Top of her class at school, she narrowly avoided child marriage at the age of 10 by smearing aubergine on her teeth to make them black just before her suitors arrived. The author of over 50 books published in more than 20 languages across the world, Nawal was born in a village in Egypt in 1931. ![]()
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