Susan Abulhawa

Biography

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian American novelist, poet, and activist who has become one of the most widely read English-language voices of the Palestinian experience. Born in 1970 to refugees of the 1967 war, she had a fractured childhood across Kuwait, Jordan, and an orphanage in Jerusalem before settling in the United States, a trajectory of displacement that suffuses her fiction. Her debut novel, "Mornings in Jenin" (2010), traces four generations of a Palestinian family from the 1948 expulsion through life in the Jenin refugee camp and the diaspora. An international bestseller translated into more than thirty languages, it is among the most commercially successful Palestinian novels ever written in English and introduced a vast global readership to the history of the Nakba through intimate family narrative. Her later novels, "The Blue Between Sky and Water" and "Against the Loveless World" (winner of the Palestine Book Award and an Arab American Book Award), confirmed her standing as a powerful storyteller of exile, resistance, and survival. She also writes poetry and essays, and her work is noted for blending lyrical prose with unsparing political clarity. Beyond literature, Abulhawa founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a nonprofit building recreational spaces for children in the occupied territories and refugee camps, and she co-founded the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, the first of its kind in North America. She is an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights on international platforms. By carrying the Palestinian narrative into mainstream English-language fiction with both critical and popular success, Abulhawa has played a singular role in shaping how a global audience encounters Palestine.

Why This Person Matters

Her novel "Mornings in Jenin," translated into over thirty languages, brought the story of the Nakba to a mass global English-language readership like no Palestinian novel before it.

Historical Context

Born in Kuwait in 1970 to refugees of the 1967 war, Abulhawa endured a fractured childhood across Kuwait, Jordan, and an orphanage in Jerusalem before settling in the United States, a trajectory of serial displacement that became the wellspring of her fiction. She belongs to the diaspora generation that grew up with the Nakba and 1967 as inherited wounds rather than direct memory, and her writing emerged in the post-9/11 and Second Intifada years when English-language readers had little intimate access to Palestinian experience. Mornings in Jenin (2010) drew directly on the history of the Jenin refugee camp, scene of the 2002 Israeli incursion. Her activism and her fiction alike respond to decades of exile and the long Gaza siege.

Historical Context

1. 1970 — Born in Kuwait City, Kuwait

Selected Works

• Mornings in Jenin — A multigenerational Palestinian family saga spanning from 1948 to 2002 through war, exile, and the refugee camp in Jenin. One of the best-selling Palestinian novels in translation, published in over 30 countries.

Legacy & Influence

Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin, translated into more than thirty languages, became among the most commercially successful Palestinian novels ever written in English, introducing a mass global readership to the history of the Nakba through intimate family narrative. Her later novels, including the Palestine Book Award-winning Against the Loveless World, confirmed her as a major storyteller of exile and resistance. Beyond literature she founded Playgrounds for Palestine, building recreational spaces for children in the occupied territories, and co-founded the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, the first of its kind in North America. She is remembered for singularly carrying the Palestinian narrative into mainstream English-language fiction.

Topics & Themes

• Post-1967
• Diaspora

References & Sources

1. Susan Abulhawa — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Susan-Abulhawa
2. Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa — review — https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/19/against-the-loveless-world-by-susan-abulhawa-review