Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and educated at Baghdad University. She is a poet and a former Literary Editor of The Baghdad Observer. Facing increasing harassment from the authorities for her writings, Mikhail left her native country in the 1990s, travelling first to Jordan, then the US, where she studied Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. She speaks Aramaic and writes in Arabic and English: she has published four collections in Arabic and one lyrical, multi-genre text, The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She has been a director of the Iraqi American Centre and currently lives in the US.