Maha Hassan

Maha Hassan is a Syrian-Kurdish journalist and novelist. She was born in Aleppo. A native Kurdish speaker, she writes in Arabic. In 2000, she was banned from publishing in her native Syria for her "morally condemnable" writing, and since August 2004, she has been living in self-imposed exile in Paris.

In 2005, she was awarded a Hellman/Hammett grant for persecuted writers by Human Rights Watch. In 2007-2008, Hassan lived for a year at the invitiation of Amsterdam Vluchtstad in the renovated apartment of Anne Frank and her family at the Amsterdam Merwedeplein.

Hassan's novel Umbilical Cord was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize in 2011. Her latest novel is Girls of the Wilderness.