Hala Alyan

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American author and clinical psychologist. Born in New York, she grew up across multiple countries in the Middle East before returning to the United States for her education. She completed her doctorate in clinical psychology at Rutgers University and practices as a psychologist in New York City. Alyan is the author of four poetry collections and three novels, including Salt Houses (2017), her debut novel, which follows a Palestinian family across six decades and multiple countries—from Nablus to Kuwait, to Beirut, to Paris, to New York—mapping the Palestinian diaspora through intimate family history. Salt Houses won the Arab American Book Award for Fiction, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction in 2018, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her subsequent novels The Arsonists' City (2021) and The Ones We're Meant to Find (2022) received strong critical notices. As a poet, Alyan has won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Award and the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor's Choice Award. Her work bridges the personal and the political, the psychological and the historical, with particular attention to displacement, memory, and the meaning of home.