Tamara Chalabi

Tamara Chalabi is a Beirut born Lebanese-Iraqi writer, whose paternal family was exiled from Iraq in 1958. She grew up and was educated in the Middle East, Europe and America and went to boarding school in the UK.  She studied at Brown University followed by an MPhil at Cambridge University and a PhD in History and the Middle East from Harvard University. Her first book, The Shi'is of Jabal'Amil and the New Lebanon: 1918-1943 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. She has written for the Sunday Times, New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Slate and Prospect on war, culture, encounters and identities.

She is a co-founder of the Ali Wardi History Prize in Baghdad, for a work of research, and is also the executive director of the Abdul Hadi Chalabi Foundation launching innovative humanitarian projects in Iraq from affordable artificial limbs to organic agriculture.  She lives between London, Baghdad and Istanbul.