Susan Abulhawa (Arabic: سوزان أبو الهوى, born June 3, 1970) is a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian-American writer and human rights activist and animal rights advocate.[1] She is the author of several books, and the founder of a non-governmental organization, Playgrounds for Palestine.[2] She lives in Pennsylvania.[3] Her first novel, Mornings in Jenin, was translated into 32 languages and sold more than a million copies. The sales and reach of her debut novel made Abulhawa the most widely read Palestinian author of all time.[4] Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky And Water, was sold in 19 languages before its release, and was published in English in 2015. Against the Loveless World, her third novel, was released in August 2020, also to critical acclaim.[5][6][7]
Early life and education
Abulhawa's parents, born in At-Tur in East Jerusalem, were refugees of the 1967 war. Her father, according to one account,[3] "was expelled at gunpoint; her mother, who was studying in Germany at the time, was unable to return and the couple reunited in Jordan before moving to Kuwait, where Abulhawa was born in 1970."
Her parents split shortly after her birth and Abulhawa's childhood was turbulent, moving between Kuwait, the United States, Jordan, and Palestine. She lived in the United States with an uncle until she was 5, then spent several years moving between relatives in Jordan and Kuwait. She lived in Dar el Tifl, a Jerusalem orphanage, from the age of 10 to 13.[3]
At 13, Abulhawa came to the US, where she lived with her father briefly before entering the foster care system in the US.[citation needed]
Prior to writing her first book, Abulhawa had a career in biomedical science, where she worked as a researcher for a pharmaceutical company.[citation needed]
In addition to three novels, in 2013 Abulhawa published a collection of poetry entitled My Voice Sought the Wind.[8]
Abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine,[9] an NGO that advocates for Palestinian children by building playgrounds in Palestine and UN refugee camps in Lebanon. The first playground was erected in early 2002.[10]
Abulhawa is signatory to the boycott campaign against Israel, including the cultural boycott. She gave the keynote address at one of the first campus BDS conferences at the University of Pennsylvania.[11] Abulhawa claimed the BDS movement, according to a 2012 profile, "as one of the most effective ways to promote Palestinian rights and achieve justice against Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing".[12]
She compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.[13][14]In 2013, Abulhawa declined an invitation from Al Jazeera to participate in a discussion about the Israel-Palestine issue with several Israelis, including some who were highly critical of Israeli policy.[15]
Controversy
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In February 2023, invited to speak at the Adelaide Writers' Week festival in Australia, Abulhawa caused controversy due to her Twitter comments describing Jewish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a "Nazi-promoting Zionist" and accusing him of dragging "the whole world into the inferno of WWIII", leading to three invited Ukrainian authors withdrawing from the event.[16]
Writing in The Electronic Intifada about the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, she said : “Palestinian fighters finally broke free ... in a spectacular moment that shocked the world. In a stunning display ... a few dozen sparsely armed commandos ... paraglided over the electrified fences… These brave Palestinian fighters overtook Israeli colonies built on their ancestral villages.”[17]
Works
Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin, which was published in 2010 by Bloomsbury, has been translated into Arabic by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing.[3] It has also been translated into at least two dozen other languages and has become an international bestseller.[18]
The French author and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy called Mornings in Jenin "a concentration of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish clichés masquerading as fiction".[19] Abulhawa responded by dismissing Levy as a "French pop star of philosophy and intellectual elitism" and accusing him of "name-calling": "He simply slaps on the word 'anti-Semitism' to discredit any negative portrayal of Israel.... Mr. Levy accuses us of 'demonizing Israel', when in fact, all we do is pull back the curtain, however slightly, to show a dark truth he wishes to keep hidden. I suspect that Mr Levy feels, as most Jewish supporters of Israel do, that he is more entitled to my grandfather's farms than I am. After all, that is really the foundation of Israel, isn't it?"[20]
Filmworks Dubai bought the film rights to Mornings in Jenin, planning to begin production in late 2013. Anna Soler-Pont, head of the Pontas agency, which sold the film rights to the novel, said: "This is going to be a special project. There aren't any epic films on Palestine yet."[21] However, the producer died shortly after and the rights reverted to her.[citation needed]
^Abulhawa, Susan (2009). "Palestinians Will Never Forget". Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. American Educational Trust. Retrieved August 17, 2015.
^(Researcher), Penny Johnson; Shehadeh, Raja (2012). Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home. Women Unlimited. ISBN978-8188965731.
