On August 31, the last day of the month, the Nobel Prize in Literature committee in Stockholm has received a nomination for Nawal El Saadawi in several consecutive years. The committee has not announced its deliberations. The prize has gone elsewhere.

El Saadawi was born on October 27, 1931, in Kafr Tahla, Egypt, on the banks of the Nile. She trained as a psychiatrist, practiced medicine, and in 1972 published Women and Sex — a book that connected the physical and psychological oppression of Egyptian women to the structures of religious authority, state power, and male violence that enforced it. She was fired from her position at the Egyptian Ministry of Health. The book was banned.

She kept writing. Woman at Point Zero (1975) is a novel structured around a woman on death row, condemned for killing the pimp who controlled her, telling her story to a prison psychiatrist. God Dies by the Nile (1985) is about a village terrorized by a corrupt mayor who takes young women for his own use, while the religious structures that might resist him look away. The targets of her analysis were not abstract: patriarchy as enforced by religion, state institutions, and social custom — in Egypt specifically, and in the Arab world generally.

She was imprisoned in 1981 under Sadat, released after his assassination, and placed on death threat lists by Islamic extremist groups in the 1990s. She taught at Duke and Washington State during periods of exile. She lectured at universities across Europe and the Americas. She was translated into thirty languages. She wrote forty-seven books.

The Nobel Committee awarded the prize to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988 — the only Arab writer to receive it in the twentieth century. El Saadawi died on March 21, 2021, at eighty-nine, having outlived most of the people who had tried to silence her, having been nominated for the Nobel Prize repeatedly for three decades, having not received it.

Her body was returned to Egypt. She was buried in her village.