Ruqaya Izzidien

Ruqaya Izzidien is an Iraqi-Welsh novelist and journalist whose writing examines colonialism, identity and the modern history of the Middle East. Raised in rural Wales, she studied at Durham University and later lived and worked in Cairo, the Gaza Strip and Morocco. Her fiction developed partly from a desire to portray Arab and Muslim characters as the central participants in their own histories rather than as peripheral figures in Western accounts.

Izzidien’s debut novel, The Watermelon Boys, is set principally in Baghdad between 1915 and 1920, during the First World War, the collapse of Ottoman authority and the establishment of British control in Iraq. Following an Iraqi family and a Welsh soldier whose lives are transformed by the conflict, the novel explores nationalism, military occupation, racial prejudice and the betrayal of promises of independence. It won a Betty Trask Award in 2019 and offers a corrective to romanticised portrayals of the British Empire in the Middle East.