Nidaa Khoury

Nidaa Khoury was born in 1959 in Fassuta

Nidaa Khoury was born in 1959 in Fassuta in the Upper Galilee, to a family from Aleppo. Her father worked in textiles. At 14 she was sent to the Saint Joseph boarding school for girls in Nazareth, and she left school when she married at 17.

She has four children. Nidaa is a pen name meaning a voice calls. She worked at Mercantile Discount Bank for 9 years before starting university studies.

At Haifa University she studied advertising, arts administration and philosophy and comparative literature. She earned a master's degree in education from Latvia University in 2000. She also studied entrepreneurship at Tel Aviv University in 2003.

Her first book of poetry appeared in the 1980s, and by 2016 she had published 12 poetry books in Arabic, Hebrew, English and Italian. Her 1997 book was censored in Jordan, and her Book of the Flaw, published in Haifa in 2011, questions Holy Communion. She began teaching at Ben-Gurion University in 2005 and became a senior lecturer in 2009.

She founded the NGO Bakaa for volunteering in Arab society and directed it from 2003 to 2011. A 2009 short film about her life won first prize at the Gaffers Festival in Sacramento.