Susan Abulhawa

Abulhawa's parents, born in At-Tur in Jerusalem, were refugees of the 1967 war. Her father, according to one account,[3] "was expelled at gunpoint; her mother, who was studying in Germany at the time, was unable to return and the couple reunited in Jordan before moving to Kuwait, where Abulhawa was born in 1970."

Her parents split shortly after her birth and Abulhawa's childhood was turbulent, moving between Kuwait, the United States, Jordan, and Palestine. She lived in the United States with an uncle until she was 5, then spent several years moving between relatives in Jordan and Kuwait. She lived in Dar el Tifl, a Jerusalem orphanage, from the age of 10 to 13.[3]

At 13, Abulhawa came to the US, where she lived with her father briefly before entering the foster care system in the US. She remained a ward of the court until she emancipated herself at the age of 17 and finished high school, college, and graduate school on her own.

Prior to writing her first book, Abulhawa had a successful career in biomedical science, where she worked as a researcher for a pharmaceutical company.

In addition to three novels, in 2013 Abulhawa published a collection of poetry entitled My Voice Sought the Wind.[8]

Abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine,[9] an NGO that advocates for Palestinian children by building playgrounds in Palestine and UN refugee camps in Lebanon. The first playground was erected in early 2002.[10]

She is involved in the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and as a speaker for Al Awda, the Right to Return coalition.[3]

Abulhawa is signatory to the boycott campaign against Israel, including the cultural boycott. She gave the keynote address at one of the first campus BDS conferences at the University of Pennsylvania.[11]

Abulhawa claims the BDS movement, according to a 2012 profile, "as one of the most effective ways to promote Palestinian rights and achieve justice against Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing".[12]

She compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.[13] [14]In 2013, Abulhawa declined an invitation from Al Jazeera to participate in a discussion about the Israel-Palestine issue with several Israelis, including some who were highly critical of Israeli policy.[15]

In February 2023, invited to speak at the Adelaide Writers' Week festival in Australia, Abulhawa caused controversy due to her Twitter comments describing Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a "Nazi-promoting Zionist" and accusing him of dragging "the whole world into the inferno of WWIII", leading to three invited Ukrainian authors withdrawing from the event.[16]

Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin, which was published in 2010 by Bloomsbury, has been translated into Arabic by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.[3] It has also been translated into at least two dozen other languages and has become an international bestseller.[17]

The French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy called Mornings in Jenin "a concentration of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish clichés masquerading as fiction".[18] Abulhawa responded by dismissing Levy as a "French pop star of philosophy and intellectual elitism" and accusing him of "name-calling": "He simply slaps on the word 'anti-Semitism' to discredit any negative portrayal of Israel.... Mr. Levy accuses us of 'demonizing Israel', when in fact, all we do is pull back the curtain, however slightly, to show a dark truth he wishes to keep hidden. I suspect that Mr Levy feels, as most Jewish supporters of Israel do, that he is more entitled to my grandfather's farms than I am. After all, that is really the foundation of Israel, isn't it?"[19]

Filmworks Dubai bought the film rights to Mornings in Jenin, planning to begin production in late 2013. Anna Soler-Pont, head of the Pontas agency, which sold the film rights to the novel, said: "This is going to be a special project. There aren't any epic films on Palestine yet."[20] However, the producer died shortly after and the rights reverted to her. Another producer recently optioned the rights for a TV series.

• The Leeway Foundation Edna Andrade award for fiction and creative non-fiction[26]
• Best Books Award for Historic Fiction[27]
• MEMO Palestine Book Award[28]
• Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award[29]
• Aspen Words Award finalist
• Arab American Museum Award for Fiction
• MEMO Palestine Book Award
• Long-listed for Rathsbones Folio Prize
• Finalist for the 2020 Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award[30]

• Susan Abulhawa on Twitter (account suspended)
• Biography, Bloomsbury Publishing
• Baby Martyr
• Interview With Susan Abulhawa