Women and Sex was so controversial that, after it was published, the book was immediately banned in Egypt and El Saadawi lost her job. She also received death threats. “I’d be a liar if I said I have not been afraid,” she tells me. “But I got rid of my fear. I managed and I got rid!” El Saadawi has a philosophy, she says: “In order to survive you need hope. Hope is power.”

In the 1980s, several books later, she was sent to jail by President Sadat because she was viewed as a threat to the State. Still, she reflects, she never lost hope. “When I was in prison, I told my cellmates… I told them ‘we will survive and Sadat will die’… and that is exactly what happened.”

During her time in the jail, El Saadawi penned the book Memoir From a Woman in Prison. “I changed prison from a negative experience to a positive experience by writing a book,” she remembers, "and it is one of my best books. I wrote it on toilet paper – a prostitute smuggled to me her eyebrow pen and I wrote it with that.” I laugh, but El Saadawi remains serious. “Creative power: That is survival,” she says.

El Saadawi was eventually released from prison, but was forced to flee Egypt in 1988 after receiving more death threats, so she moved to America to teach writing and political dissidence at left-wing universities. Now back in her homeland, I ask if she’d choose to live anywhere else. “No!” She snaps. “I cannot live anywhere except Egypt because I have to change from the inside. In my country, I have a role.”

Still, it’s not all been plain sailing since she moved back in the late 90s. El Saadawi ran for the post of Egyptian President in the 2004 elections, but was forcibly made to stand down. “The government prevented me,” she recalls.

She doesn’t think it’s her gender that made her a worthy candidate to run for government, but her political outlook. “I do not divide people by their gender, I divide people by their mind. There are men who are much more progressive and against class hierarchy and against oppression. And then there are women like Angela Merkel, Margaret Thatcher and Hillary Clinton… all those women are very patriarchal.”

El Saadawi's feminism is not confined to her gender. “It is not enough to be a woman if your brain is patriarchal,” she says.