Nathalie Handal

Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature and Creative Writing Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: MPHIL University of London; MFA Bennington College

nh53@nyu.edu

Research Areas: global literature, poetry; flash reportage; literary travel writing; diasporic literatures, Mediterranean crossroads.

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Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France, and the Middle East and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Claire Messud writes, she “illuminates the luxuriance and longing of deracination — a contemporary Orpheus.” She is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Life in a Country Album, winner of the 2020 Palestine Book Award Winner and a finalist for the Foreword Book Award, and 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 and the Arab American Book Award. She has written eight plays, and her creative nonfiction and flash reportage has appeared in Vanity Fair, Guernica Magazine, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation, The Irish Times, among others. Handal is the recipient of awards from the PEN Foundation, The Lannan Foundation, Centro Andaluz de las Letras, Fondazione di Venezia, among others. She writes the literary travel column “The City and the Writer” for Words without Borders magazine.

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. She has taught, lectured, and/or given workshops globally, namely at Columbia University, La Sorbonne Paris, Yale-NUS Singapore, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Universitat Leipzig, Germany, among others.