Hala Kawsarani is a Lebanese novelist born in Beirut in 1977. She stayed in the city throughout the civil war witnessing the difficult postwar years until the total collapse of the country today. Her passion for writing began at an early age; writing became her way to understand the world around her. Shes studied political science and Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut. Kawsarani joined the weekly magazine Laha when it was founded in 2000 as a cultural editor, before becoming the managing editor and editor-in-chief.
She was chosen as one of the most promising 39 authors under the age of 40 of Arab heritage in the project Beirut39, a collaboration between Hay Festival and Beirut World Capital of the Book 2010.
In 2017 she became Arabic editor-at -large for the newly founded Vogue Arabia. She joined the Lebanese American University in 2019 as a part-time instructor, teaching an undergraduate creative writing course in Arabic, a position she held in until the summer of 2022 when she left Beirut for Doha. Her novels have been the subject of a number of academic studies including Felix Lang’s The Lebanese Post-Civil War Novel: Memory, Trauma and Capital (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
