Fadia Faqir is an Arab British author. Faqir was born in Amman in 1956 and educated in Jordan and England. She gained her BA in English Literature from the University of Jordan, Amman, before going in 1984 to Britain where she completed an MA in creative writing at Lancaster University. The University of East Anglia awarded her the first Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing in 1990. Her first novel, Nisanit, published by Penguin in 1988, is set in two undisclosed Middle East countries, and recounts the story of a young girl whose father is arrested because of his political activities, and a Palestinian guerrilla fighter captured by the Israeli forces. Pillars of Salt, her second novel, was published by Quartet Books in 1996, and has been translated into German, Danish, Dutch, Romanian and Bulgarian. Set in colonial and postcolonial Jordan, according to one critic, the novel ?stands between East and West, and combines Arabic traditional storytelling with postmodern narrative tricks?. There is a strong feminist message concerning two Arab women, one a Bedouin, the other from the town, incarcerated in an asylum through the actions of their brother and husband respectively.