Manal al-Sharif is a women’s rights activist, IT consultant, writer and blogger who has been campaigning for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia for many years. Al-Sharif launched a Facebook campaign in 2011 encouraging Saudi women to drive, for which she was detained twice. She later launched a Twitter campaign calling for the release of female prisoners who had been arrested for owing small sums of money. She was awarded the first annual Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum this year and Time magazine named her as one of the 100 most influential people of 2012.
