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

Life and career 
After graduating from secondary school, Hassan acquired a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Aleppo. In some of her works, she has fictionally treated taboos of Arab societies, such as abortions and honour killings, as in her novel Daughters of the Wilderness.

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 invitation of Amsterdam Vluchtstad in the renovated apartment of Anne Frank and her family at the Amsterdam Merwedeplein.

Hassan's novels Habl suri (Umbilical Cord, 2011) and al-Rawiyat (The Novels, 2014) and were longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. In 2021, her novel The Neighbourhood of Wonder was shortlisted for the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.

A 2022 literary study investigated the "concept of home" in Hassan's Drums of Love and Ghassan Jubbaʿi's Qahwat Al-General  as examples of contemporary Syrian literature following the beginning of the Syrian revolution. The study posited "that in both works a real sense of home proves unattainable" and "that the unattainable sense of home depicted in the novels marks such texts as a part of the enduring legacy of the Syrian revolution and its causes."

Selected works 
 The Infinite: Biography of the Other
 The Picture on the Cover
 Hymns of Nothingness
 The Tunnel of Existence
 Daughters of the Wilderness
 Habl suri (Umbilical Cord), 2011
 al-Rawiyat (The Novels), 2014
Metro Halab (Aleppo Subway), 2017
Amat sabahan ayatuha al-harb (Good Morning, War! ), 2017
The Neighbourhood of Wonder

See also 

 Syrian literature

References

External links 

Writers from Aleppo
Syrian Kurdish women
Syrian journalists
Syrian women journalists
Syrian women novelists
Syrian novelists
Syrian exiles
Year of birth missing (living people)
20th-century novelists
Living people
20th-century women writers
21st-century Syrian women writers
21st-century Syrian writers