Hanan Al-Shaykh, a leading contemporary Arab writer of novels, short stories and plays - I met her at the EdBookFest while she presented her newest project: 19 newly adapted of the 1,001 tales from the Arabian Nights in English. She took care to have the stories truthfully translated: piquant, sometimes even luscious, stories definitely revising the 'Disneyfied' children's stories Western readers have come to know. I found it most intriguing to meet another author from the East widening my narrow Western point of view. And with it someone who is not afraid of telling the truth, certainly not wanting to please anyone (not even her mother...). 
Hanan Al-Shaykh was born in Beirut, Lebanon. Her mother had been married to a widowed brother-in-law by the time she got her period becoming a step-mother to three bereaved nephews. Not only was her husband 18 years her senior but he was additionally a very religious man. As the mother fled the family to be with a man she actually had been in love with, Hanan was brought up in a very traditional and pious way. She first attended a traditional Muslim girls' primary school and later the sophisticated Ahliyyah School. At the age of 18 she studied at the American College for Girls in Cairo where she wrote her first novel: Intihar rujul mayyit. In 1975, her second novel was published: Faras al-Shaitan. Both novels include biographical elements that relate to her very religious father while examining relations between the sexes and and the patriarchal control. As she said herself, she started to write to release her anger and frustration. But she sidestepped a typical first novel - the novel is narrated by a middle-aged man and his obsessive desire for a young girl which gave Hanan room to examine the power relation between men and women. Those issues, as well as a traditional society, religious taboos, sex and politics will stay with her. Her next novel Hikayat Zahrah (The Story of Zahra, 1980) won her international attention as her book had been banned in most Arab countries forcing her to publish it at her own expense. It is a controversial book about a directionless young woman and the chaos around the Lebanese Civil War. Lebanese readers dismissed the book because they thought it falsifies the Arab culture.
But this isn't Hanan to compromise - she prefers to provoke and giving voice to the voiceless as in her book Women of Sand and Myrrh, writing about a lesbian couple. Back in Beirut, Hanan worked as a journalist for Al-Hasna', a women's magazine, later for the An-Nahar newspaper. In 1976, Hanan left the Lebanon to live in Saudi Arabia avoiding the civil war until she finally decided in 1982 to move to London with her husband and two children. As a rule, she writes in Arabic, having her books translated into English but with One Thousand and One Nights, she told the audience at the EdBookFest, she was asked to make an exception and wrote it directly in English. The same summer, the Edinburgh International Festival presented a stage version of her adaptation. I would have loved to see it but it had been sold out. So, I do what I love to do: I savour her books!