May Telmissany is an associate professor of Arabic studies at University of Ottawa, and an internationally acclaimed novelist dedicated to the cause of secularism and civil rights. The daughter of Egyptian documentary pioneer ‘Abd al-Kader al-Telmissany, she was born in Cairo in 1965. She studied French literature at Ain Shams University and at Cairo University before moving to Canada in 1998, where she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature and Cinema from Université de Montréal.
She is an important representative of the Egyptian writers known as the Nineties Generation. Her novel Dunyazad (دنيازاد) – published by Dar Sharqiyat, Cairo, in 1997 and by Dar Al Adab, Beirut in 2001 tells the story of a woman who suffers the greatest tragedy that can occur to a mother, the loss of her child. Dunyazad was translated into seven languages (French, German, English, Catalan, Spanish, Danish, and Italian).
