ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Najwa Kawar Farah is a Palestinian writer who has been contributing to the Palestinian and Arabic literature for several decades. The bulk of her publications are short stories, novels and poems. Najwa was born in Nazareth and lived in Haifa until 1965, and then in two West Bank cities, Jerusalem and Ramallah. Najwa also lived in Lebanon, the UK and presently resides in Canada.

Najwa's life experience in Palestine and the Middle East, provided her with the political, historical, and socio-cultural milieu from which she draws and develops her characters.

Most of her protagonists are Palestinians, mainly 'ordinary' people especially refugees uprooted from their homes and homeland, who seek answers to their individual and collective historical predicament. Many of these protagonists are resilient women, who in addition to their political oppression encounter social discrimination. Her stories and novels come in eleven collections in Arabic. A number of them have been translated into English, Hebrew, Danish and Finnish.

Her collection of entertaining folktales came directly from people that Najwa met in Palestine in the 1940's.