A woman born in 1931 in Kafr Talah, a village in Egypt, had to fight for everything she got. Nawal El Saadawi wrote clear-eyed about the limitations women in her world faced, and used medicine to change the fortunes of women around her. In 1955, she graduated with a medical degree from Cairo University and became a physician in rural Egypt. Here, she saw first-hand how the world wasn’t made for women.

Her response was to write. Her 1972 book Women and Sex tackled taboo subjects head-on, from sexuality, to female circumcision, which she herself had been a victim of at age six — and for this, she was fired from the Ministry of Health and blacklisted from public work. But she only wrote more. Fiction, essays, memoir, all sharp and unflinching. In Woman at Point Zero, a woman on death row tells her story with devastating clarity. It became one of her most widely translated works, and a touchstone of feminist literature worldwide.

In 1981, Saadawi was arrested by Anwar Sadat’s government and imprisoned without a trial. She said, blithely, that she was jailed because, in fact, she had taken Sadat at his word. “He said, ‘There is democracy and we have a multi-party system and you can criticise’. So, I started criticising his policy and I landed in jail.” While in prison, she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, the first legal and independent feminist group in Egypt. She smuggled out a memoir written with a pencil on toilet paper.

Upon her release, El Saadawi spent years in exile, lecturing and writing across the globe, but always returned to Egypt. Her brand of feminism was complex multifaceted, opposing religious extremism, while also refusing to accept that Islam was to blame for the way that women were subjugated in the Arab world. She was class-conscious, and hyper critical of capitalism and colonialism in propping up the patriarchy. When she died in 2021, at 89, tributes poured in from around the world, from feminists, activists, writers, and critics. Nawal El Saadawi’s legacy endures in the minds she sharpened and the conversations she made impossible to ignore.