[5] Nagat El Sagheera was born in Cairo, Egypt on 11 August 1938 as the daughter of prominent Kurdish-Egyptian[6][7]Arabic calligrapher Mohammad Hosni, who hailed from Damascus,[8] and an Egyptian mother.

[15] Along with Umm Kulthum, she was one of a small group of female singers who formed the Egyptian “golden age” of music in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.

She gained many fans after releasing the song, Irja Ilyya (Return to Me), based on a poem by Nizar Qabbani whose sister had committed suicide rather than enter into an arranged marriage.

[17] In a recorded interview,[18] in the mid-1960s for Egyptian TV with the presenter Ms Salwa Hegzi, Nagat stated that she had, at that time, eight brothers and sisters.

Following Gawhara's divorce from Hosni and remarriage to Abdel Monem Hafez, another six children were born (three boys: Jaheer, Jaser and Jalaa; and three girls: Gehan, Janjah and Jeely).

Leading artists from across the Arab world regularly visited Hosni's home in Khan el-Khalili, Cairo.

Her first marriage was at young age, in 1955, when she was 16 (or 17) years old to an Egyptian man called Kamal Mansi who was a friend of her brother.

Nagat also divorced from her second husband, Egyptian film director Houssam El-Din Mustafa (1926–2000), shortly afterwards and has remained single to date.

Media reports suggest that she made a decision to devote her life to raising her only child, Waleed, from her first marriage, and to her work.

Renowned Egyptian journalist Fekry Abaza (1896–1979) demanded the State should support the young gifted Nagat.

However, in 1949, the iconic Egyptian music composer Mohamed Abdel Wahab (1902–1991) actually filed an official complaint at the Police station against Nagat's father.

To hold onto her audience for the longer durations on stage Nagat turned her attention to people like Nizar Qabbani.

In total, Nagat El Sagheera may have recorded more than 200 songs;[29] top 53 of which are available on Apple's iTunes web site[30] She built on this success in subsequent years, despite the difficulty of finding new outstanding poems and corresponding music compositions.

Kamal Al Taweel (1922–2003),[31] one of her distinguished collaborators, indicated in a TV interview that as far as music composers were concerned Nagat El Saghira was the best performer in the Arab world.

There is an interesting photo of an archived 1960 letter[41] circulating in the media, addressed to Nagat El Saghira and hand-written by Nizar when he was in China on a diplomatic mission.

[34] Besides Nizar Qabbani, other famous Arabic poets and song writers of the 20th century also obliged Nagat; such as Maamoun Shennawi (1914–1994) who wrote "Your love is my life", his brother Kamal Shennawi (1908–1965)[42][43] who wrote "Do not lie" and Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi who described her warm soft voice as "diamond-like".

One example is that she replaced several words in and even deleted possibly more than one line from “Mata?” the original poem by Nizar Qabbani before she agreed to perform it.

in January 2024, she was invited to attend the Joy Awards in Riyadh and sang Oyoun El Alb, her signature song before getting honored for her lifelong career.