Edward Said was an author and scholar of international reputation. A professor of comparative literature at Columbia University and literary critic, he became widely known, also outside the academic community for his book "Orientalism", a critique on Western scholarship published in 1978.

His thesis had a lasting effect on scholarship concerned with non-Western, especially Middle Eastern cultures. Using a great number of examples from both fiction and academic writing, he showed how the West had presented the East or "Orient" as the essential "Other" of the West, a passive and eternally static construct, never changing and always irrational and intellectually inferior. Herein Said saw the academic justification for the Western colonial project and the subjugation of non-Western peoples and cultures. A heated debate in academic circles followed, Said‘s ideas were both fiercely contested and passionately embraced and encouraged new readings of Non-Western cultures, as advanced by other non-Western scholars like Homi K. Bhabha. The academic discipline of postcolonial studies and theory owes much of its existence to Edward Said‘s writings.

Said was himself of Arab Palestinian origin. He spent much of his childhood and youth in Cairo where he received a largely British school education and subsequently went to the USA to pursue his studies at a number of well known universities. He received his PhD at Harvard University.

Throughout his career he was confronted with Western prejudices towards his identity as an Arab and a Palestinian, something that had a lasting effect on his own thinking. He saw himself as a speaker for his people in the West, a true humanist and intellectual who criticized senseless violence, but never gave up hope for a peaceful solution for the Middle East.

He died in 2003 after a long struggle with cancer.