Selma Dabbagh


Selma Dabbagh is a British-Palestinian writer who gained fame in 2011 with Out of It, an acclaimed novel centered on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which was nominated as a Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012
Born in Scotland, Dabbagh is the daughter of a Palestinian father from Jaffa and an English mother. Now a full-time writer of fiction, she has spent lengthy periods in Kuwait, France, Egypt and Bahrain, with almost annual visits to Palestine. Before concentrating on writing, she worked as a human rights lawyer in London with frequent visits to the West Bank and Cairo. Since 2004, she has written short stories which have appeared in New Writing 15 and Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women. She has twice been a finalist in the Fish Short Story Prize for Beirut-Paris-Beirut and Aubergine. In 2014, her radio play The Brick was broadcast by the BBC.