Ghada al-Samman (Arabic: غادة السمان, b. 1942) is a Syrian novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, publisher, and one of the world’s best known Syrian novelists.Ghada al-Samman was born in Damascus into an intellectual family and received her secondary education at the French Lycée in Damascus. She studied English literature at the University of Damascus, then continued her education at the American University of Beirut. Her dissertation, for which she collected material in London and other European cities, was on English literature. In 1964, she returned to Damascus and began teaching at Damascus University, where her father Ahmad al-Samman was rector at the time.
She received her doctorate from Cairo UniversityGada al-Samman is the author of several collections of poetry, 6 collections of short stories, 5 novels, and a number of books of journalistic and memoir nature. Gada al-Samman’s first book “Your Eyes are My Destiny” was published in 1962 in Beirut, and brought her fame in the literary circles of Syria and Lebanon. The true popularity (9 reprints) of this book came after Ghada herself became famous. In 1975, she published her masterpiece Beirut’75. – a novel that, “according to critics and readers, seemed to foreshadow the events of the Lebanon War of 1975-1990”.
A year later, she published Beirut’s Nightmares, a book about the horrors of the Civil War, which Ghada herself witnessed. By the 1980s, al-Samman was already considered one of the best contemporary writers in the Arab world, and by the 1990s her works began to appear in English and French translations.
Ghada al-Samman’s novel “Nightmares of Beirut” is about the events of the summer of 1976, when Lebanon was engulfed by a monstrous tornado of civil war. Written in the form of a diary, the novel with documentary veracity reproduces the details of the fratricidal conflict, inspired by spline imperialism and local reaction, reveals the social and class contradictions of Lebanese society, which for many years were hidden behind the respectable signboard “Mediterranean paradise.