Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa (Arabic: سوزان أبو الهوى; born 1970) is a Palestinian-American scientist, writer, and activist. She wrote the novels Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), and Against the Loveless World (2020). A human rights activist and animal rights advocate, she founded the children's organization Playgrounds for Palestine.

Susan Abulhawa's parents, born in At-Tur a neighborhood on the Mount of Olives east of the Old City of Jerusalem, were Palestinian refugees of the Six-Day War in 1967. Her father, according to one account, "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."^[1]

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 al-Tifl al-Arabi, a Jerusalem orphanage, from the age of 10 to 13.^[1] At 13 she returned to the United States, where she lived with her father briefly before entering the foster care system.^[2]

Abulhawa studied biology at Pfeiffer University in North Carolina, and completed a masters in neuroscience (biomedical science ) at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine.^[2][1]

After her studies, Abulhawa began a career in medical science.^[2][1] Prior to dedicating herself to writing full-time, she worked as a researcher for a large pharmaceutical company.^[3][4]

In July 2001, Abulhawa founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-governmental children's organization dedicated to upholding The Right to Play for Palestinian children and build playgrounds in Palestine and UN refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.^[5] The first playground was erected in early 2002.^[6][7] She is involved in the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and as a speaker for Al Awda, the Palestinian right of return coalition.^[1] 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.^[8] Abulhawa said the BDS movement was "one of the most effective ways to promote Palestinian rights and achieve justice against Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing".^[9]

Abulhawa has compared Israel to apartheid South Africa.^[10] In 2013, Abulhawa declined an invitation from Al Jazeera to participate in a discussion about the Nakba with three or four Israelis, having been asked by the producer to participate as the only Palestinian as they needed her to "balance things out".^[11][12] In her letter explaining her refusal to participate, she stated:

Imagine Germany never acknowledged the Jewish holocaust. Imagine, we are living in an era where Jews are still fighting for basic recognition of their pain. Then imagine that on the day in which Jews engage in solemn remembrance of their greatest collective wound, television shows choose to feature German sons and daughters of Nazis in a discussion expressing differing views on whether or not and/or how Germany should deal with the memory of the genocide their country committed. And imagine, of course, there is a token Jew "to balance out" such an ill-timed and inappropriate public conversation.^[12]

In 2024, Abulhawa declared in light of the Gaza war that "Israel is committing the holocaust of our time, and it is doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world."^[13] On November 29, 2024, Abulhawa was invited by the Oxford Union to debate the motion, "This House Believes Israel is an Apartheid State Responsible for Genocide". She spoke as member of the team in favor of the proposition together with Miko Peled and Mohammed El-Kurd. The motion was carried with a majority of 278 to 59. The Oxford Union later deleted her original recording on YouTube and uploaded a censored version. Abulhawa responded that the Union seemed to have yielded to demands from Zionists "as Palestinians struggle to make our voices heard in the midst of a genocide".^[14][15]

Abulhawa has referred to Israelis as "rootless, soulless ghouls" in her writing, as well as describing the October 7, 2023, attacks as a "spectacular moment".^[16] She described the Gaza war as a "Jewish supremacist slaughter", writing, "these sons of Satan will taste what they meted to us".^[17] New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani criticized her comments as "reprehensible" and "patently unacceptable".^[17][16] Mamdani was criticised by some of his supporters for "reinforcing harmful narratives that conflate support for Palestinians with anti-Jewish sentiment". Abulhawa said that her comments were not antisemitic or anti-Jewish and that she was responding "to a Zionist power structure and its proponents from the perspective of a Palestinian who has experienced the ravages of that system".^[17]

Later in March 2026, Abulhawa spoke about her criticism of Mamdani's response to her comments, stating that "There is a pattern of using Palestine and Palestinian pain for, whether it's street cred or political gain or whatever it is, and then throwing us under the bus when whatever gain has been achieved." Abulhawa criticised Jewish Americans, stating that they "are the most privileged demographic in this country... I think the resentment that they are seeing now is stemming from the world watching the so-called Jewish State commit a genocide." She added, "We can't ignore the fact that it’s not just Israelis, it is Jewish Americans... I think no words, no terrible words should be spared for these monsters, because they are monsters."^[18]

Abulhawa's political and romantic fiction is written in English. Her first language in which she learned to read and write was Arabic.^[5] Her writing career began with essays and political commentaries. Her work appeared in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Internationalist, The Christian Science Monitor , and more.^[19]

Abulhawa is a contributing author to two anthologies, Shattered Illusions (Amal Press, 2002) and Searching Jenin (Cune Press, 2003).^[20]

Her debut novel The Scar of David (2006), republished as Mornings in Jenin (2010), is a multigenerational family epic spanning five countries and more than sixty years, focusing on the effects on Palestinians of the Israeli occupation. It became an international bestseller translated into 32 languages.^[1][21][22]

In 2013 Abulhawa published a collection of poetry entitled My Voice Sought the Wind.^[23]

Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), a novel of family, love and loss centered on Gaza City, garnered a global readership and critical acclaim.^[24][25] Her third novel, Against the Loveless World, was published in 2020, again to critical acclaim.^[12][26][27]

• Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010, ISBN 978-1608190461).
• The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015, ISBN 978-1632862228).
• Against the Loveless World (Bloomsbury, 2020, ISBN 978-1526618801).

• Will the Flower Slip Through the Asphalt: Writers Respond to Capitalist Climate Change, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2017.
• This Is Not A Border: Reportage & Reflections from the Palestine Festival of Literature, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.^[28]
• Shattered Illusions, anthology (Amal Press, 2002)^[29]
• Searching Jenin, anthology (Cune Press, 2003)^[29]
• "Memories of an un-Palestinian story, in a can of tuna" in an anthology: Penny Johnson; Raja Shehadeh (eds.) (2012). Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile and Home.^[30]
• My Voice Sought The Wind, poetry collection (Charlottesville: Just World Books, November 2013)^[31]

• Arab American Book Award Winner^[32]
• The Leeway Foundation Edna Andrade 2003 award for fiction and creative non-fiction^[19]
• Best Books Award for Historic Fiction^[33]
• MEMO Palestine Book Award^[34]
• Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award^[35]
• 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize Finalist^[36][37]
• Arab American Museum Award for Fiction^[38]
• Long-listed for Rathsbones Folio Prize^[32]
• 2020 Palestine Book Awards Winner^[32]
• Finalist for the 2020 Athenaeum of Philadelphia Literary Award^[39]

• Jenin – Palestinian city, northern West Bank

• Mohammed Alwuraafi, Ebrahim (2024). "Narrating the Other Half of the Palestinian Story: Reading Susan Abulhawa's Novels as Counternarratives". International Critical Thought. 14 (1): 119–142. doi:10.1080/21598282.2024.2325840.
• Miri, Sima (2021). "Representation of Trauma in Susan Abulhawa's Mornings in Jenin". International Journal of English and Studies. ISSN 2581-8333 3 (12): 96–103

• Susan Abulhawa on Twitter
• Biography Archived December 4, 2010, at the Wayback Machine, Bloomsbury Publishing
• Baby Martyr
• Interview With Susan Abulhawa