Woman at Point Zero

Woman at Point Zero is a novel by the Egyptian writer Nawal El Saadawi, written in 1975 and first published in Arabic in 1977.

The book is based on Saadawi's meeting with a woman in Qanatir Prison, and it is the first-person account of Firdaus, a woman convicted of murder who agrees to tell the story of her life before her execution. What she describes is the way her society and the men in it treated her from her childhood onwards, and the novel explores themes of women and their place within a patriarchal society.

Saadawi had been removed from her position as Director of Health Education, and from the editorship of a magazine, after publishing Women and Sex at the end of 1972. She began research into neurosis among Egyptian women, and during that work a doctor at Qanatir Prison told her about the inmates, including a woman who had killed a man and been sentenced to hanging.

She visited the prison in the autumn of 1974 and conducted twenty-one in-depth case studies for a book published in 1976, but Firdaus, as she calls her, remained a woman apart. Firdaus was executed in 1974, and Saadawi said afterwards that she could not rest until she had written her story down.