Suad Amiry

Who is Suad Amiry?

Suad Amiry is an author and also an architect living in the West Bank city of Ramallah. She studied architecture at the American University of Beirut, the University of Michigan, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Her parents went from Palestine to Amman, Jordan. She was brought up there and went to Lebanon's capital of Beirut to study architecture. When she returned to Ramallah as a tourist in 1981, she met Salim Tamari, whom she married later, and stayed.

Her book "Sharon and My Mother-in-Law" has been translated into 19 languages, the last one in Arabic, which was a bestseller in France, and was awarded in 2004 the prestigious Viareggio Prize in Italy together with Italo-Israeli Manuela Dviri, a journalist, playwright and writer whose son was killed by a Hezbollah rocket.

From 1991 to 1993 Amiry was a member of a Palestinian peace delegation in Washington, D.C.. She is engaged in some major peace initiatives of Palestinian and Israeli women.

She is Director and founder of the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation, the center was founded in 1991; the first of its kind to work on the rehabilitation and protection of architectural heritage in Palestine.