Mourad, Kenizé

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Mourad, Kenizé

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Home—Istanbul. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Oneworld Publications, 185 Banbury Rd., Oxford OX2 7AR, England.

CAREER: Journalist and novelist. Nouvel Observateur, France, reporter.

WRITINGS:

De la part de la princesse morte (novel), R. Laffont (Paris, France), 1987, translation by Sabine Destrée and Anna Williams published as Regards from the Dead Princess: Novel of a Life, Arcade (New York, NY), 1989.

Le jardin de Badalpour (novel), Fayard (Paris, France), 1998.

Le parfum de notre terre: voix de Palestine et d'Israël, R. Laffont (Paris, France), 2003, translated as Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict, Oneworld Publications (Oxford, England), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: For most of her career, journalist Kenizé Mourad has been a reporter for the French political magazine Nouvel Observateur. Mourad is the daughter of an Indian father and a Turkish mother, and one of her novels, De la part de la princesse morte, is based on the life of her mother, Selma, an Ottoman princess and granddaughter of the last Turkish sultan.

Mourad's Le parfum de notre terre: voix de Palestine et d'Israël, translated and published as Our Sacred Land: Voices of the Palestine-Israeli Conflict, contains interviews with residents of Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip that reflect the lives of both Israelis and Palestinians who have been touched daily by the violent regional struggle about which Mourad reported for fifteen years. One resident is a Palestinian who relates that his home was bulldozed three times, and he rebuilt it each time. Many are people whose lives have been changed by suicide bombings, including the family of the first female suicide bomber. Other interviewees include Jewish settlers and a Christian clergyman.

Fred Rhodes, writing in Middle East, praised the book's "rare and moving insight into the minds and souls of the victims on both sides." Also lauding the book, a Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "for anyone numbed by the tactics and body counts … this collection of first-person experiences lends humanizing depth."