Ghada al-Samman

Ghadah Al-Samman (غادة السمّان; born 1942) is a Syrian writer, journalist and novelist born in Damascus in 1942 to a prominent and conservative Damascene family.

Her father was Ahmed Al-Samman, a president of the University of Damascus.

She is distantly related to poet Nizar Qabbani, and was deeply influenced by him after her mother died at a very young age.

Her father was fond of both Western literature and Arabic literature; this influenced her deeply and gave her a unique style that combines attributes of both.

Nevertheless, she soon was confronted with the conservative Damascene society in which she was raised.

In the late 1960s al-Samman married Bashir Al Daouq, the owner of Dar Al Tali’a publishing house and had her only son, Hazim, which she named after one of her heroes in Foreigners' Nights.

She later started her own publishing house and re-published most of her books.

Further, she edited all her articles in a series she called “The Unfinished Works” (الأعمال غير الكاملة).

She has published fifteen books, nine of them are poetry collections.

She has stored her unpublished works including many letters in a Swiss bank, which she promises to publish “when the time is right”.

She published her first book of short stories Your Eyes Are My Destiny (عيناك قدري) in 1962, which was received reasonably well.

However, at the time she was lumped in with other traditional feminine writers.

Her later publications took her out of this milieu of feminine and love novels, and into wider social, feminist and philosophical spheres.

She graduated from the Syrian University in 1963 with a BA in English literature, and left to Beirut to earn her master's degree in theatre from the American University of Beirut, after which she did not return to Damascus.

In Beirut she worked as a journalist, and in 1965 she published her second collection of stories, No Sea in Beirut (لا بحر في بيروت), which show the effects of her new, wider experiences.

She then traveled around Europe working as a correspondent and in 1966 published her third collection Foreigners’ Nights (ليل الغرباء).

The Six-Day War had a shock effect on her, as it did on many of her generation.

This was evident in her famous article "I Carry My Shame to London" (احمل عاري إلى لندن).

After that she did not publish any books for six years.

Instead, her journalistic articles became closer to the social reality and made her popular.

The articles she wrote during that period became the source of some of her later publications.

In 1969 she joined the weekly news magazine of Salim Lawzi, Al Hawadeth, as a correspondent.

In 1973 she published her fourth collection, The Departure of Old Ports (رحيل المرافئ القديمة), considered by some critics to be one of her most important works.

In this collection of short stories, she described the dilemma of the Arab intellectual and the conflict between his/her thought and actions.

She published her first novel, Beirut 75 (بيروت 75), at the end of 1974.

The novel describes the complex social problems in Beirut and prophesied the upcoming turmoil a few months before the civil war broke out in Lebanon.

After the publication of two more novels, Beirut Nightmares (كوابيس بيروت) in 1977, which describes life in civil-war-torn Beirut in the mid-Seventies, and The Eve of Billion (ليلة المليار) in 1986, some critics began referring to her as the most prominent modern Arab writer.

She has lived in Paris since the mid-1980s and regularly writes in an Arabic magazine published in London.

Al-Samman's mother died when she was young, so she was raised by her father for most of her life.

When she was an adult, Samman's father died and she lost her job in a short period of time.

People in her society had a traditional frame of mind and saw her as a “fallen woman”.

In 1993 she caused a scene in the literary and political arenas when she published a collection of love letters written to her by Ghassan Kanafani in the sixties when she had a love affair with him, which was no secret at the time.

She was condemned for publishing them by some claiming that her intention was to smear the late writer's reputation and/or to negatively affect the Palestinian Cause.

Al-Samman has also written a few books of literary criticism, and translated some of her works to other languages.