In her teenage years, she was also a huge fan of the Margaret Atwood novels and this would also be a significant influence on her later writing career.

She would eventually gravitate towards poetry in which she credits “HOWL,” by Allen Ginsberg as being responsible for motivating her to take her writing seriously. Since she could not fit in, she became very observant at an early age and started writing what she heard and saw.ĭuring this time, she loved writing skits and this is how she got into writing. Neither of her parents taught her their native languages which is why she always felt like an outsider even in her own family spaces. While she was never baptized, she attended an English Catholic school.

She was born to a Canadian French mother of Irish Serbian descent and a Muslim Egyptian father. In a recent interview, Mona Awad who was born and raised in Montreal in Canada but now lives in the United States said that she always felt like an outsider. She now works at the Syracuse University Creative Writing program as an assistant professor. She would then get her doctorate in English literature and Creative Writing from the University of Denver. Mona got her MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Brown University. Before she became an author, she was a bookseller for the likes of Blackwell Books in Edinburgh and The Kings English Bookshop and Pages in Toronto. Mona has taught creative writing at the University of Denver, Brown University and has been a Visiting Writer at the UMass Amherst MFA program. She has also been nominated and won several awards for her fiction works over the years. Her writing has been featured in a variety of publications such as Maisonneuve, The New York Times, The Walrus, Vogue, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s and TIME magazine. Mona Awad is an award winning and bestselling author of literary fiction.

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