Hadiya Hussein

Hadiya Hussein is an Iraqi writer, born in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad in 1956. She started writing short stories in the 1980s and published two collections, I Apologize on Your Behalf (1993) and The Span of Two Bows from Me (1998). In 2001, her first novel Bint al-Khan (Girl of the Lodging House) was published. Over the next nine years she published five more novels, and the short story collection, Kull Shai ala Ma Uram (2002, Everything is Fine). Hadiya Hussein’s sixth novel Beyond Love, translated by Ikram Masmoudi from the Arabic Ma Ba’d al-Hub (2004), was published by Syracuse University Press in 2012. The review in Banipal 45 (2012) called it “a powerful cry from the heart against the devastation of Iraq after the first Gulf War”. A later novel Riyam and Kafa was longlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. A collection of short stories, And That’s Another Matter, won the Sharjah Award for Arab Women’s Literature, with some of the stories translated and published in Serbian, under the same title. She presently lives in Baghdad.