Ulfat Idlibi

Ulfat Idlibi was born in 1912 in Damascus, Syria, to a prominent and wealthy family. She was married at the age of 17 to a German-trained physiologist, Dr. Hamdi al-Idlibi, and broke with tradition by taking his last name. She was influenced by the Syrian revolt against the French occupation in the 1920s, and developed a nationalist and feminist consciousness. She educated herself by reading extensively from the books in her uncle's library, and started writing and publishing stories in magazines in her teens. She won a prize for a short story from the BBC Arabic service in 1948, and published several volumes of stories and novels, some of which were translated into other languages and adapted for television. Her most famous novel, Damascus - the Smile of Sadness, tells the story of a young girl who grows up in the turbulent times of the French mandate and faces oppression from both the colonialists and her conservative family. Idlibi was also a lecturer and essayist, who wrote about social, educational and literary issues, especially the position of women in the Middle East. She was a chain smoker and a secularist, and her views were in harmony with the Arab nationalist regime that ruled Syria for the last 40 years. She spent the last decades of her life between Damascus and Paris, where she died in 2007 at the age of 94. She is survived by a daughter and a son.