Faculty of Arts
- Ama Ata Aidoo
- Info
- Authors A-D
- Rafael Alberti
- Authors E-K
- Authors L-R
- Hanan al-Shaykh
- Gloria Artigas
- Authors S-Z
- Charles Baudelaire
- Eka Budianta
- Links
- Dino Buzzati
- Julio Cortazar
- Du Fu
- Dario Fo
- Hagiwara Sakutaro
- Han Yu
- Rom Harre
- Bessie Head
- Heinrich Heine
- Hesiod
- Hwang Sun-Won
- Harriet Jacobs
- Kapka Kassabova
- Naguib Mahfouz
- Alessandro Manzoni
- Angeles Mastretta
- Michel de Montaigne
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Franca Rama
- Pierre de Ronsard
- Kurt Rowland
- Mohi Ruatapu
- Sappho
- Carole Satyamurti
- Semonides
- Sijo Poetry
- So Chongju
- Gloria Steinem
- Tatyana Tolstaya
- Ivan Turgenev
- Giuseppe Ungaretti
- Wang Wei
Hanan al-Shaykh was born in Lebanon in 1945. A writer of novels, short-stories and poetry, she is considered one of the Arab world's leading women writers. Her writing deals with themes of women's role and postion in modern society. She left Lebanon in 1976 to escape the war, living in Saudi Arabia and eventually London. <BR><BR>
In 1980 she published her third novel The Story of Zahra to international acclaim. Highlighting the personal devastation wrecked by war, al-Shaykh was unable to find a publisher in Lebanon for the book which was subsequently banned through much of the Arab world.
Lebanese novelist, short story writer, journalist. Born in Beirut, al-Shaykh was raised in a strict Muslim family environment. She attended primary and middle school in Beirut, but went to Cairo for secondary school, and later attended the American College for Girls in Cairo from 1964 to 1966. Her educational experiences abroad perhaps contributed to the theme of exile in her works. A poor student by her own admission, she nevertheless loved to read, and wrote her first novel, Intihur Rajul Mayyit (Suicide of Dead Man, 1970) when she was still in college. Her most famous work, however, is The Story of Zabra (1980), which describes the life of an abused woman both before and during the Lebanese civil war. Paradoxically, the protagonist finds greater freedom and happiness during the war than in the period preceding it. This novel was widely read in the Arab world despite being banned in a number of countries for its sexual descriptions, It represents one of the greatest contributions to women's literature written in Arabic. An equally controversial novel is her Women of Sand and Myrrh (1988), in which there is a frank description of a lesbian relationship in an Arab 'desert country.' The impact of the civil war in Lebanon was, again, the focus of Beirut Blues (1992). Her most recent work is a collection titled I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops(1994). She is married and lives with her husband and two sons in London.
