Nahid Taha Abd al-Barr

Nahid Taha Abd al-Barr (, romanized: Nāhid Ṭāha ʿAbd al-Barr, 20 January 1920 – 29 July 1950) was an Egyptian poet. She wrote in the classical Arabic meter (ʿamudi poetry), and most of her extant poetry dates from the late 1940s, signing it with her initials, N. T. ʿA. in Arabic (ن. ط. ع.). She wrote a manuscript for a poetry collection, Min Wahi al-Alam ("Inspired by Pain"), but it was never printed.

Life Abd al-Barr was born in Cairo in 1920 to a father who worked as a professor at the Faculty of Dar al-Uloom. She completed her secondary schooling around 1935 at Princess Fawkia School and hoped to pursue further studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, though her family refused to allow her to enroll. From the late 1940s, she began publishing poems in major Egyptian newspapers and magazines—Al-Ahram, Al Balagh, and al-Risalah. and grew up with her sisters and one brother, Dr. Sayed Taha Abd al-Barr, who was a distinguished physician. He died in 1974, and a street in Nasr City now bears his name. Nahid never married and described herself as "the foster-child of bitter withdrawal and long solitude," stating that she "saw the world only through newspapers, books, and imagination".

Abd al-Barr’s father died in 1948, an event that deeply affected her writing. She died on 29 July 1950 at the age of thirty from a rare condition then described as "migratory phlebitis," believed by contemporaries to be a form of leukemia.

Her work frequently reflects emotional confinement and aspiration, as expressed in her poem "Al-Shaairah" ("The Poetess") and "Ayn Assa‘adah?" ("Where is Happiness?"). As gendered restrictions on education and the public sphere shaped her life, traces of these themes are mostly apparent in her poems: "Ala Lisan al-Fatah al-Misriyya" ("On the Tongue of the Egyptian Girl"), dedicated to Qasim Amin (1863–1908), "Ila Mathali al-A‘la” (“To My Supreme Ideal”), and “Amalun Tahatamat” ("Hopes Shattered").

She mourned the death of the Egyptian poet Ali Mahmoud Taha (1901–1949) with a poem titled “Awdat al-Mallah Ta’ih,” ("The Return of the Lost Sailor"), inspired by his poem “Al-Mallah al-Ta’ih,” ("The Lost Sailor").

She also showed interest in translation, rendering into Arabic the final scene of Alexandre Dumas’s (1802–1870) The Lady of the Camellias (1848) and Coventry Patmore’s (1823–1896) A Farewell (1877).