Selma Dabbagh (Arabic: سلمى الدباغ) (born 1970) is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. Her 2011 novel, Out of It, inspired by the 2008 Gaza Air Strikes, was nominated for a Guardian Book of the Year award in 2011 and 2012.[1][2][3]
Born in Dundee, Scotland, Dabbagh is the daughter of a Palestinian father from Jaffa and an English mother. She lived variously in Dundee, Reading, High Wycombe and Jeddah during her early childhood before moving to Kuwait at eight years old.
Dabbagh graduated from Durham University with a Bachelor of Arts degree and later earned an LL.M. from SOAS. Before concentrating on writing, she worked as a human rights lawyer in the West Bank, however was not able to stay in the occupied territory and moved to Cairo where she worked at AMIDEAST. She later moved to Bahrain, where she wrote her first novel.[4]
Dabbagh is strongly influenced by Palestine, the greater Palestinian diaspora, and her legal work in Human rights and International criminal law.[4] Following the COVID-19 lock-down in London, she described her motivations as "love and resistance."[5]
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 (2005) and Aubergine (2004).[2]
Out of It, published in 2011, was Dabbagh's debut novel. She edited the anthology We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers, published by Saqi in 2021.[6]
In 2014, her radio play The Brick was broadcast by BBC Radio 4.[7]
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