Rasha Omran (Arabic: رشا عمران) is a Syrian poet. She is one of the most important women Syrian poets and the author of seven poetry collections and an anthology of Syrian poetry.

Biography

Rasha Omran was born in 1964 in Tartus, Syria, into a family of artists. She is the daughter of Syrian poet Mohammad Omran,^[1] a poet, activist, and journalist, and their home was a cultural gathering place for intellectuals and artists. As a child, she read freely in her family library and she later attended Damascus University to study Arabic literature. She founded the Al-Sindiyan Festival of Litterature and Culture in her hometown in the late 1990s, which she directed for 16 years, and published her first poems after the death of her father. She has published seven collections of poetry and is the editor of an anthology of contemporary Syrian poetry.^[2]

Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, she has publicly given her support for the uprising. “This is a dictatorial regime, [....] How can I support a government that kills its citizens?”^[3] She has marched in protests, written about her dissent, and spoken out against Assad.^[4] Assad is "not a dictator, just a gangster boss."^[5] Omran coined the phrase, "the international silence on Syria is deafening.".^[6] Threatened along with her family by the Syrian regime, she went into exile in Cairo in 2012. In September 2012, Omran and four other Syrian women launched a hunger strike outside the Arab League's headquarters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, Egypt, demanding that the Arab League provides more support for the revolutionaries, and pressure Assad to halt the human rights abuses in Syria.^[7][8]

She has lived in Cairo since 2012 where she continues to write and publish her poetry, as well as three weekly articles for online Arab media where she comments on political and cultural news.