Samar Yazbek

Samar Yazbek, born in 1970, is a Syrian writer and journalist. A prominent advocate for human and women’s rights, she took part in the 2011 popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. She was named one of the Berut39 most promising authors under the age of forty in 2010 and was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize International Writer of Courage Award in 2012, followed by the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize. In 2022, she was selected as one of twelve International Writers by the Royal Society of Literature. Yazbek has published two collections of short stories, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has been translated into over twenty languages.