Nimah Ismail Nawwab

Nimah Ismail Nawwab is a Saudi poet, writer and photographer, born in Malaysia into a line of Meccan scholars. ¹ Her father, Ismail I. Nawwab, was formerly a professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. ¹ She worked for Saudi Aramco and writes in English on women, youth and Saudi society. ¹ She is described as the first Saudi woman poet to be published in the United States and the first Saudi poet to sign her work publicly. ² Her books are The Unfurling (2004) and Canvas of the Soul: Mystic Poems from the Heartland of Arabia (2012). ¹

Nawwab grew up, in her own account, speaking three languages and reading widely from childhood. ¹ Neither Wikipedia article states a birth date; the only dated source read, Wikidata, gives 12 May 1965, referenced there to her Library of Congress Name Authority record, and her data record follows it. ³ She was previously active in the field of education, and her photography has appeared in Aramco World magazine and in Theodore Friend's Woman, Man, and God in Modern Islam. ¹ In 2012 she was ranked 33rd among 500 exceptional Muslim women in a study by Areej Khan. ² The English article files her under Saudi Arabian Sufis, and her second book is a collection of mystic poems inspired by Sufism; a category filing and a book's themes are not attestation of personal affiliation, and no source read names an order or school for her in biographical prose, so the museum records her faith as unknown. ^{1 3}

The Unfurling (2004), a collection of her poems in English, drew reviews and interviews in Saudi and international magazines, and in 2005 she signed it at the Jarir Bookstore in Jeddah — a first for a Saudi woman poet, in a signing session attended by more than a hundred readers. ² Her second collection, Canvas of the Soul (2012), carries artwork and calligraphy by Jannah Yusuf Al-Jamil, and her poems also appear in the anthology Gathering the Tide, alongside other Arab poets of the Gulf. ¹ She lectures on Saudi culture and the presentation of women and youth in poetry, and blogs for the Huffington Post. ¹

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