Celebrated Syrian-Lebanese poet, novelist, and essayist, Ghada Samman is a world-recognized voice for human rights and feminism in the Arab world. In the 1960s, she wrote short stories while living in Damascus, Syria, where she was born in 1942. To write and live more freely, she moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where she obtained an MA in literature at the American University of Beirut, worked as a journalist, and published her first poetry collection Love (1973) and novel Beirut 75 (1974). Since then, Samman has been a perennial voice decrying the atrocities of war and social injustice. While believing both men and women are oppressed by patriarchy, she gives special emphasis to women's rights because she views them as doubly oppressed. Samman's writing has been translated into twenty languages and her work is discussed in over twenty critical works in English, French, Russian, Italian, and Farsi.