Nawal El Saadawi is the author of Woman at Point Zero and the narrator of the Author's Preface, Chapter 1 and Chapter 3. She writes this novel after an encounter with Firdaus in Qanatir Prison. As a psychiatrist, she had started research on the neuroses of Egyptian woman a few months earlier after being removed from her functions as Director of Health Education and editor-in-chief of the magazine "Health" by the Minister of Health at the end of 1972 due to her chosen path as a feminist author and novelist. In 1973, Saadawi writes Firdaus, or Woman at Point Zero, because Firdaus evokes in her the "need to challenge and to overcome those forces that deprive human beings of their right to live, to love, and to real freedom"