Zahra Hankir

Hankir has lived between Lebanon and the United Kingdom and studied politics at the American University of Beirut and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Manchester.[2] She won a Scripps Howard Fellowship to attend the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.[3]

Hankir worked for Bloomberg News in Dubai during the Arab Spring, covering the economy and markets.[4] She writes about culture in the Middle East and her journalism has been featured in news publications such as BBC News, VICE News, Al Jazeera English, Literary Hub, Roads & Kingdoms[5] and gal-dem,[6] as well as the Los Angeles Times.[7]

In March 2020 she appeared in a panel discussion at Adelaide Writers' Week, along with Omani novelist Johka Alharthi and Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni.[8]

Her first book, Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World,[9] featuring a foreword by Christiane Amanpour, was published by Penguin Books on 6 August 2019 in the US[10] and by Harvill Secker on 8 August 2019 in the UK.[11] It was described by Dwight Garner of the New York Times as “A stirring, provocative and well-made new anthology . . . that rewrites the hoary rules of the foreign correspondent playbook, deactivating the old clichés”[12] and by NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson as a book that will appeal to “readers of all genders and backgrounds who want to broaden their understanding of the Arab world".[13]  

In an interview with VICE News, Hankir said without the reporting of the Arab world’s women journalists: “the story of the region and its many nuances would be incomplete”.[14]

On September 9, 2020, Hankir announced that she was declining an invitation from the Women 20 (an official G20 engagement group) to moderate its annual summit, which was being hosted by Saudi Arabia. She expressed "solidarity with women's rights defenders in Saudi Arabia & beyond, including #LoujainAlhathloul, who remains in prison in the country." [15] The decision was met with criticism and verbal abuse from supporters of the Saudi regime. Sarah Leah Whitson, the former director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Human Rights Watch, referred to the criticism as "a government-orchestrated troll attack," not "backlash."[16]