Ghada al-Samman

She earned a BA in English literature from the Syrian University in 1963 and moved to Beirut for a master's degree in theatre at the American University of Beirut. She chose not to return to Damascus and worked in Beirut as a journalist. Her first collection of short stories, Your Eyes Are My Destiny, had appeared in 1962; in Beirut she published her second collection, No Sea in Beirut (1965), reflecting her broadened horizons, and a third, Foreigners' Nights (1966). She later travelled across Europe working as a correspondent, and in 1969 joined Salim Lawzi's weekly magazine Al Hawadeth as a correspondent. ¹

The Six-Day War of 1967 marked her deeply; her article "I Carry My Shame to London" dates from its aftermath, and she published no book for six years, concentrating on journalism. Her fourth collection, The Departure of Old Ports (1973), explored the gap between Arab intellectuals' thoughts and their actions. Her first novel, Beirut 75, appeared towards the end of 1974 and dealt with the complex social problems of Beirut months before the Lebanese civil war erupted; Beirut Nightmares (1977) portrayed the city during the war, and The Eve of Billion followed in 1986. Her autobiographical novel The Impossible Novel: A Damascene Mosaic appeared in 1997, and her Farewell Damascus reached English readers in Nancy Roberts's translation in 2017. She has published fifteen books, nine of them poetry collections. ^{1 2}

In the late 1960s she married Bashir al-Daouq, owner of the Dar al-Tali'a publishing house; they had one son, Hazim. She later founded her own publishing house and reissued most of her books. In 1993 she caused a stir in literary and political circles by publishing love letters written to her in the 1960s by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani; some condemned the publication, claiming it was meant to smear his reputation. She has lived in Paris since the mid-1980s and writes regularly for an Arabic magazine published in London. ¹

No article text names Ghada al-Samman's religion or any school. Wikidata's religion value for her is Islam in general — a single structured value naming no school — and the English and Urdu articles file her in categories for Syrian Muslims; category filings are not attestations. The museum therefore records her faith as unknown, flagged, with the position stated exactly in her data record. ^{1 3 4}

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