Suzanne Alaywan is a poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and painting

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

. She has admitted to Joan Miro

Joan Miró

Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...

 as being inspiration to her work, in addition to Japanese art

Japanese art

Japanese art covers a wide range of art styles and media, including ancient pottery, sculpture in wood and bronze, ink painting on silk and paper and more recently manga, cartoon, along with a myriad of other types of works of art...

.

Personal life

Born in Beirut

Beirut

Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...

 to a Lebanese

Lebanese people

The Lebanese people are a nation and ethnic group of Levantine people originating in what is today the country of Lebanon, including those who had inhabited Mount Lebanon prior to the creation of the modern Lebanese state....

 father and Iraqi

Iraqi people

The Iraqi people or Mesopotamian people are natives or inhabitants of the country of Iraq, known since antiquity as Mesopotamia , with a large diaspora throughout the Arab World, Europe, the Americas, and...

 mother. Due to the Lebanese civil war

Lebanese Civil War

The Lebanese Civil War was a multifaceted civil war in Lebanon. The war lasted from 1975 to 1990 and resulted in an estimated 150,000 to 230,000 civilian fatalities. Another one million people were wounded, and today approximately 350,000 people remain displaced. There was also a mass exodus of...

, Alaywan spent her adolescent years between Andalus

Andalus

Al-Andalus Ensemble is an award-winning husband and wife musical duo that performs contemporary Andalusian music. The ensemble features Tarik Banzi playing oud, ney and darbuka, and Julia Banzi on flamenco guitar...

, Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, and Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

. In 1997 she graduated from the faculty of Journalism and Media in the American University of Cairo.

Publications

Since 1994, Alaywan has published nine collections of poetry.

• Café Bird (1994)
• Angels’ Hideout (1995)
• Unique (1996)
• Temporary Sun (1998)
• No Way Out (1999)
• A Presence Called Love (2001)
• Blind Lantern (2002)
• Envisioning the Scene (2004)
• Junk Words (2006)

External links

• Official site in Arabic
• Official Blog