Layla AlAmmar

Layla AlAmmar is a Kuwaiti novelist and academic. She grew up in Kuwait, with an American mother and a Kuwaiti father, took a master's in creative writing at the University of Edinburgh, and earned a doctorate on Arab women's fiction and literary trauma theory; she is an assistant professor of English literature at the American University of Kuwait. ^{1 2} Her debut novel, The Pact We Made (2019), is set in contemporary Kuwait; her second, Silence Is a Sense (2021), follows a Syrian refugee in Britain. ¹ She has written for The Guardian, LitHub and the Times Literary Supplement. ²

AlAmmar grew up in Kuwait and, in her own account, completed her master's in creative writing at Edinburgh in 2013. ¹ Her short fiction has appeared in the Evening Standard, Quail Bell Magazine and Aesthetica Magazine, where her story "The Lagoon" was a finalist for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award in 2014, and she was the British Council's international writer in residence at the 2018 Small Wonder Short Story Festival. ¹ She now teaches English literature at the American University of Kuwait, and her journalism and criticism appear in The Guardian, LitHub, the Times Literary Supplement, ArabLit Quarterly, The New Arab, GQ Middle East, New Lines Magazine and The Markaz Review. ² The sources read give no birth date for AlAmmar, and the queue year of 1982 is attested in none of them, so her data record carries no birth entry; the sources also name no religion for her, so the museum records none. ^{1 2}

The Pact We Made, published by The Borough Press in March 2019, is her debut novel: the story of Dahlia, a young Kuwaiti woman who, as she approaches thirty, refuses the path set out for her and decides to leave her country. ¹ Her second novel, Silence Is a Sense (2021), follows a Syrian refugee in Britain who cannot speak about what she has seen, as she becomes involved in the life of her neighbourhood and a far-right march approaches. ¹ Alongside the novels she writes literary journalism and criticism on Arab women's fiction, the field of her doctorate. ²

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