Zahra Freeth


Zahra Dickson Freeth was a British author who wrote primarily about the Middle East. She was the daughter of H. R. P. Dickson and Dame Violet Dickson.

Life

Zahra Dickson grew up in Kuwait. There she and her family would spend time collecting animal and plant specimens for the Natural History Museum and Kew Gardens, discovering one plant and two insects that were previously unknown to science. One of the latter, a grasshopper, was named after Zahra: Utubius syriacus zahrae, now known simply as Utubius syriacus. She later attended boarding schools in England, including Cheltenham Ladies College, and studied for her BA at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her first book, Kuwait Was My Home, was published in 1956. She accompanied her husband Richard Freeth to the bauxite mining town of Mackenzie, now known as Linden, in British Guiana and wrote Run Softly, Demerara about her experiences there.
Her later writings were on Middle Eastern topics, including a children's book, Rashid of Saudi Arabia. She lived in Essex. Her brother, Hanmer Yorke Warrington Saud Dickson, MBE, who had served as H.M. Acting Commissioner in Anguilla, died in May 2005.
Zahra Freeth died on 20 May 2015 after a short illness. Her obituary in the Girton College alumni magazine described her as 'a respected author who wrote about Kuwait and Arabia in the days before the oil boom'

Legacy

Freeth's writings are of use to modern-day anthropologists studying the change in Kuwaiti society. One such study commented that the "transformation of social values is clearly revealed in the history writings of Kuwait in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly in the work of Zahra Freeth, the daughter of a British diplomat who lived in Kuwait before and after the discovery of oil."

Books by Zahra Freeth