After surviving a lawsuit filed against her in Saudi for publishing her novel in Arabic back in 2005, the English version of Rajaa Al Sanea’s controversial bestseller had finally hit the shelves last year and received much media attention. Al Sanea’s novel Girls of Riyadh is not only her first novel but deals with a taboo subject that is not often discussed in Saudi. Al Sanea portrays the lives of four upper-class Saudi girls living in the kingdom’s capital of Riyadh, and their successes and failures in love.
What differentiates Al Sanea’s novel is its focus on the opinions and beliefs of women in
Saudi society and the situations they often find themselves in. The novel takes a peek into a section of society that has often been kept well hidden due to cultural, traditional and religious reasons.
It took Al Sanea over six years to write the novel, which includes a mixture of classical and colloquial Arabic and is peppered with transliterated English phrases and uses an informal writing style.
Al Sanea grew up in Riyadh in a family of doctors and currently resides in Chicago where she is a dental graduate student. She had only turned 25 last year.
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