A short life of the author
Hanan al-Shaykh (b. 12 November 1945, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese novelist and playwright who broke open the subject of Arab women’s inner lives — their desires, their frustrations, their sexuality, and their resistance to patriarchal control — with a directness that transformed Arabic-language fiction and made her one of the first Arab women writers to achieve an international readership. Her work was banned in several Arab countries, which tells you everything about what she dared to say.
Life and Career
Al-Shaykh was born in Beirut, in the Shia Muslim quarter of Ras al-Nabaa — a densely populated, conservative neighbourhood that she would later fictionalise in her novels. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she was raised in a household marked by the tension between traditional expectations and the modernising energies of post-independence Lebanon. She was sent to the American College for Girls in Cairo, where she encountered a more liberal intellectual environment, and subsequently worked as a journalist in Beirut, contributing to the Lebanese magazine Al-Nahar.
She published her first novel, Intihar Rajul Mayyit (Suicide of a Dead Man, 1970), at twenty-five. But it was The Story of Zahra (1980) — written during the early years of the Lebanese Civil War — that made her reputation and changed the landscape of Arabic-language fiction.
The Story of Zahra (1980)
Hikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra) is one of the most important Arabic novels of the twentieth century. Its protagonist, Zahra, is a young Lebanese woman trapped between the violence of the civil war and the violence of patriarchal family life — beaten by her father, exploited by her uncle, and subject to the control of the men around her. The novel follows Zahra through marriage, emigration to Africa, and return to a Beirut consumed by war, and its treatment of female sexuality — direct, unapologetic, and shorn of the evasions and metaphors that Arabic literature had traditionally used — was revolutionary.
The novel was banned in several Arab countries for its sexual frankness and its refusal to idealise either Arab women or Arab society. Al-Shaykh published it herself in Beirut after it was rejected by mainstream publishers. It was later translated into over twenty languages and became one of the most widely read Arabic novels in the West.
Women of Sand and Myrrh (1989)
Misk al-Ghazal (Women of Sand and Myrrh) follows four women from different backgrounds — a Lebanese woman, an American woman, and two local women — living in an unnamed Gulf state. The novel explores the suffocating constraints of Gulf society through the overlapping perspectives of women who experience those constraints differently depending on their nationality, class, and relationship to patriarchal authority. The unnamed setting allows al-Shaykh to write about the Gulf without the complications of identifying a specific country, and the novel’s portrait of women’s lives under extreme social control is both enraging and deeply humane.
Later Works
Beirut Blues (1992) — an epistolary novel set during the Lebanese Civil War — and Only in London (2001) — about four Arab expatriates whose lives intersect in London — extended al-Shaykh’s range geographically and formally. Only in London is notable for its treatment of Arab identity in the diaspora — the ways in which emigration liberates and constrains simultaneously.
One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling (2011) — her adaptation of the Scheherazade stories for the stage, commissioned by Tim Supple — brought her work into theatre and demonstrated her engagement with the Arabic literary tradition.
Themes and Critical Standing
Al-Shaykh’s central subject is women’s agency — the possibilities and limits of women’s freedom in societies structured by patriarchal authority, religious conservatism, and war. She writes about sexuality not as provocation but as a fundamental dimension of human experience that Arab literature had suppressed, and her refusal to be euphemistic is itself a political act.
She has been compared to Naguib Mahfouz (for her realist engagement with Arab society), to Nawal El Saadawi (for her feminist politics), and to Assia Djebar (as a fellow Arab woman novelist addressing gender and colonialism). She lives in London and writes in Arabic, and her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Key Works
- The Story of Zahra (1980)
- Women of Sand and Myrrh (1989)
- Only in London (2001)
Collecting al-Shaykh
Arabic originals (Dar al-Adab, Beirut) are the primary collected form. English translations are published by Anchor (US) and Bloomsbury (UK), bringing $10–$25. The Story of Zahra (Anchor, 1995) is the most collected English edition. Al-Shaykh signs at international literary festivals (Edinburgh, Hay-on-Wye, London).