Hala Alyan

In The Arsonists' City, published in 2021, Idris Nasr resolves to sell the Beirut house he has inherited, and his wife Mazna and their three grown children gather there for a summer to argue him out of it. Hala Alyan wrote it after Salt Houses (2017), which took the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and an Arab American Book Award and stood as a Chautauqua Prize finalist; the second novel reached the shortlist of the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Alyan is Palestinian American, born in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1986, brought up in Kuwait until her family sought asylum in America after Iraqi forces invaded in 1990, and afterwards in Oklahoma, Texas, Maine and Lebanon. She holds a degree from the American University of Beirut, a master's from Columbia and a doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers. She keeps a clinical practice and teaches applied psychology at New York University. Her poetry runs from Atrium, winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in poetry, to The Moon That Turns You Back in 2024.