Fadia Faqir

The prologue of Faqir’s fourth novel, At the Midnight Kitchen, was published in Weber Studies and won their fiction award for 2009.

Faqir’s work is written entirely in English and is the subject of much ongoing academic research and discussion, particularly for its ‘translation’ of aspects of Arab culture. It is recognised for its stylistic invention and its incorporation of issues to do with Third World women’s lives, migration, and cultural in-betweeness.

In 2007, Faqir’s novel My Name is Salma (USA, Cry of the Do) was published by Doubleday. The story follows the life of the eponymous Arab woman starting from her early Bedouin life until, having given birth to an illegitimate daughter and fearful of becoming victim to an ‘honour killing’ at the hands of her brother, she is forced to flee as a refugee to Britain. As a migrant she suffers indifference and racial abuse, and longs to return home to find her daughter. But "for Salma, religion and homeland are both intertwined, both judgmental and cruel, simultaneously the sites of public shame and individual guilt" My Name is Salma was translated into 13 languages and published in 16 countries.

Faqir has also published play scripts and short stories including "The Separation Wall", first published in Magnetic North by New Writing North in 2005. She introduced and edited In the House of Silence: Autobiographical Essays by Arab Women Writers, published in 1998. This formed part of the award-winning series, Arab Women Writers (translated from Arabic), published by Garnet, for which Faqir was general editor. Until 2005, Faqir was Lecturer and coordinator for the Project of Middle Eastern Women's Studies at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Durham. Since then she has mainly concentrated on writing fiction, as well as teaching creative writing, and is currently Writing Fellow at St Aidan’s College, University of Durham. She is the initiator and co-founder of the Banipal Visiting Writer Fellowship.

Faqir was born in Amman in 1956 and educated in Jordan and England. She gained her BA in English Literature from the University of Jordan, Amman, before going in 1984 to Britain where she completed an MA in creative writing at Lancaster University. The University of East Anglia awarded her the first Ph.D. in Creative and Critical Writing in 1990. Her first novel, Nisanit, published by Penguin in 1988, is set in two undisclosed Middle East countries, and recounts the story of a young girl whose father is arrested because of his political activities, and a Palestinian guerrilla fighter captured by the Israeli forces. Pillars of Salt, her second novel, was published by Quartet Books in 1996, and has been translated into German, Danish, Dutch, Romanian and Bulgarian. Set in colonial and postcolonial Jordan, according to one critic, the novel ‘stands between East and West, and combines Arabic traditional storytelling with postmodern narrative tricks’. There is a strong feminist message concerning two Arab women, one a Bedouin, the other from the town, incarcerated in an asylum through the actions of their brother and husband respectively. The author blames both the patriarchy of her native land and the meddling of the British colonizer for the fates of both women.