Mona Awad

About Mona

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and has lived in the US since 2009. Her debut novel, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (Penguin, 2016), won the Amazon Best First Novel Award, received the Colorado Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Arab American Book Award. It was also long-listed for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the International Dublin Award. Bunny, her second novel (Viking, 2019), was a finalist for a GoodReads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award, earned the Massachusetts Book Award, and won The Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. It is currently under option with Bad Robot Productions. Her third novel, All's Well, released in the summer of 2021, was longlisted for the International Dublin Award and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, McSweeney’s, TIME magazine, Ploughshares, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere.

Mona has taught creative writing at Brown University, the University of Denver, Framingham State, Tufts and in the MFA program at UMass Amherst, where she served as a visiting writer. She has worked as a bookseller for various independent bookstores including Pages in Toronto, The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City, and Blackwell Books in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a freelance journalist and a food columnist for the Montreal-based magazine Maisonneuve.

She earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. She completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University.