Iman Mersal was born and raised in a small village in the Nile Delta. Her childhood was marked by the premature death of her mother. As a student at Mansura university, she joined a Marxist group with which she published a feminist magazine, Bint al-ard (Daughter of the Earth). Shortly after moving to Cairo to pursue her studies, she published her first collection of poems (1990) and joined the young poetic and literary avant-garde that became known as the generation of the 1990s. After publishing two new collections (1995 and 1997) she emigrated with her husband in 1998 to Boston, and then to Edmonton (Canada), where she works as an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Alberta. However, she has maintained a close relationship with her native country, where she has since published two other collections of poems (2006 and 2013), as well as two prose books (2016 and 2019). She is also the translator of a novel and a memoir from English into Arabic (2011 and 2016). Her books and poems have been widely translated into numerous languages, whether in collective anthologies, literary magazines, and individual collections and she has read in numerous poetry festivals around the world. Her recent creative non-fiction books are highly original pieces of writing that blend academic research and intimate reflections on a great variety of topics, most of which have to do with her identity as a woman and as an artist.