From beneath a veil, a Saudi woman is setting her conservative Arab homeland alight.

Hissa Hilal is already challenging convention by being at once a journalist and a wife and mother of four children.

But it is her blistering poetry – recited while dressed in a traditional head-to-toe abaya cloak and broadcast on traditional Arabic television – that is really defiant.

Using a traditional verse form native to the Arab Peninsula’s nomadic tribes, she writes critically about the country’s hard-line Muslim clerics, calling them: “vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind”.

…”What made me so angry is seeing the Arab society becoming more and more kept to itself, not like before – loving and caring and sharing and open and welcoming everyone,” she told the BBC’s World Service.

“Now, even if you want to be simple and nice with others, people are asking themselves whether it is haram [forbidden] to say hello to strangers,” she said, adding: “I blame those who have led the people, and directed them this way.”

Hissa Hilal’s words are delivered from beneath a spotlight and televised across the Arab world from the capital of UAE, Abu Dhabi, on a reality television programme called The Million Poets, where contestants compete to be the best poet.

If she wins, she will take home a prize of $1.3m (£870,000) in cash.