Mona Yahia

Mona Yahia was born in 1954 in Baghdad

Mona Yahia was born in 1954 in Baghdad and grew up there in a Jewish family. In 1970 she fled with her family to Iran, and from there she immigrated to Israel.

She served in the military from 1972 to 1974. She then studied psychology and French at Tel Aviv University. After a year in Paris, she studied clinical psychology in Tel Aviv and worked as a psychologist.

In 1985 she moved to Germany to study fine arts at the Academy of Arts in Kassel. In her art she used photographs and everyday objects to comment on how German society remembers the Holocaust.

In 2000 she published her first novel in London. It shows Jewish life in Baghdad in the 1960s through the eyes of a teenager and was translated into German, French and Hebrew. She lives and works in Cologne and writes in English.