(1958 - )

Born in Beirut to an Australian mother and a Lebanese father, Nada Awar Jarrar attended school at the International College in Beirut and went on to complete an undergraduate degree in the History and Politics of the Middle East at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. She subsequently gained a Masters of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the American University in Washington DC.

She lived in London, Paris, Washington DC and Sydney before returning to Beirut in the mid-1990s where she worked as a journalist on The Daily Star, Lebanon’s only English-language newspaper. 

Her first novel, Somewhere, Home, was published in 2003 by Heinemann UK and won the Commonwealth Best First Book award for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. Dreams of Water, her second novel, was published by Harper Collins UK in 2007, and her third novel, A Good Land, also published by Harper Collins UK, was shortlisted for Best Book for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Nada is now based in Beirut where she lives with her husband Bassem and their daughter Zeina. She is working on her fourth novel.