Nathalie Handal

Courses
Asian & Arab Diaspora in Literature & Film
The City and the Writer: New York

Education
M.Phil. University of London, England (English and Drama)
Post-Graduate Certificate, Humber College, Canada (Fiction)
M.F.A. Bennington College (Creative Writing—Poetry)

NATHALIE HANDAL was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, and educated in Asia, the United States and United Kingdom. Her recent books include Life in a County Album (2019), praised by Claire Messud as a book that “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination—a contemporary Orpheus”; the flash collection The Republics, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; the bestselling bilingual collection La estrella invisible / The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times says is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” She has worked on over twenty theatrical productions either as a playwright, director or producer. Author of eight plays, her most recent works have been produced at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in London. She writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders.

Handal has promoted international literature through translation and research. She is the editor of the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award, and named one of the top 10 Feminist Books by The Guardian; and co-editor of the W.W. Norton landmark anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, both Academy of American Poets bestsellers. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, on PBS and NPR, among others. In 2017, she was included as one of the 100 Outstanding Contributors to their Fields exhibition, inaugurated in the United Nations in New York and Geneva. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Pen International Croatia Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honors. She has given talks, workshops and/or lectured globally, namely at La Sorbonne Paris, Yale-NUS Singapore, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, Columbia University, and as Picador Guest Professor, Universitat Leipzig, Germany.