About Haifa Zanaga

Haifa Zangana (هيفاء زنكنة - born 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq) is an Iraqi novelist, author and artist. She is most notably known for writing Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London and City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance. Her recent books are Dreaming of Baghdad and The Torturer in the Mirror with Ramsey Clark and Thomas Ehrlich Reifer.

Articles by Haifa Zanaga

Solitude and dream: literature post-9/11

HZIraqi novelist Haifa Zangana survived torture under Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1970s and was subsequently forced into exile in London. So even though she was by then observing from a distance, Zangana’s fiction was not unaffected by what she calls the “mayhem and destruction” brought to Iraq by the 9-year long US-led occupation. After 2003, Zangana, already the celebrated author of three novels, including Women on a Journey: Between Baghdad and London, stopped writing fiction and joined the anti-war movement. Since then, she has written extensively about the huge toll of the occupation on Iraqi civilians in articles for publications including the Guardian, and in non-fiction books such as The Torturer in the Mirror, a collection of essays that questions the US’s justification for torture after 9/11.

In this interview, she talks about when fiction became insufficient for grasping the magnitude of a post-9/11 reality.

This week's editor

Heather McRobie


Niki Seth-Smith is a freelance journalist and co-editor of OurKingdom.

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