Rasha Abbas


Rasha Abbas is a Syrian author and journalist, best known for The Invention of German Grammar, a collection of short stories in Arabic. She was a winner of the young writers' award at the 2008 Arab Capital of Culture.

Biography

Rasha Abbas was born in 1984 in Latakia, Syria. She was brought up in Damascus. She studied journalism at the Damascus University, which she joined in 2002. While working as an editor at the Syrian state television, she published a collection of short stories, Adam hates TV, for which she won a young writers award at the 2008 Arab Capital of Culture.
When the Syrian civil war started, she joined the anti-government protest movement. A year later, she was forced into exile in Lebanon. In 2014, she won a Jean-Jacques Rousseau fellowship for a three-month residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. During this time she published her second book of short stories, The Invention of German Grammar. This fictionalised her experiences of settling in Germany as a refugee, and of learning the German language. The German translation appeared before the Arabic original, which she had to rework to adapt to Arabic idiom.
In 2017, Abbas participated in the Shubbak Literature Festival at the British Library, London. Her presentation, The Seven of Cups, was based on her research on the cultural and political ramifications of the short-lived union between Syria and Egypt as the United Arab Republic.
Abbas successfully applied for asylum in Germany after her residency in Stuttgart. She lives in Schöneberg, Berlin.

Selected works

Articles and stories

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