As a journalist with more than two decades of experience in the Middle East, I know the history of the region, how it impacts current events and how social and cultural conditions shape today’s news. 

Born in New Zealand, I grew up in Australia and was schooled there, but I am the daughter of Lebanese immigrants. I traveled to Beirut during its civil war for family vacations. Even in war, there was life in Beirut, a childhood lesson that guides my work.

I am an independent print and television journalist, fluent in Arabic. I’ve been honored with more than half a dozen journalism awards including the 2015 Michael Kelly Award, the 2014 George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, and the 2013 Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism. My first documentary, CBC’s Syria: Behind Rebel Lines, won a Canadian Screen Award. Shortlisted for more than a dozen other international accolades, including thrice a finalist for the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents and twice for the One World Media International Journalist of the Year, I have received fellowships from the European Council on Foreign Relations (twice), New America, the Ochberg at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the Nieman fellowship at Harvard University.

I was invited to writing residencies at Yaddo and the Carey Institute’s Logan non-fiction program, both in New York, to work on my first book, No Turning Back. Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria. The book won the OPC’s Cornelius Ryan Award for the best non-fiction book on international affairs, and was a finalist for five other awards, among numerous honors, including being selected as a NYT Notable Book of 2018 and a Financial Times’ Best Book of 2018. No Turning Back was also nominated for NYU Journalism’s Top 10 Works of Journalism of the Decade while GQ Magazine named it one of The 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century. My second book, Sisters of the War, published in September 2020, is a young adult adaptation of parts of No Turning Back and is aimed at teenage readers. My third book, The Cave, published in March 2024, is the memoir of Amani Ballour, a Syrian doctor who became director of an underground wartime hospital in Ghouta, Damascus.

I have written for TIME, the New Yorker, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, Politico, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Australian, CSM, and a host of other newspapers and magazines, and have appeared on CNN, France 24, BBC, CBC, CBS, PBS, Al-Jazeera and Channel 4 to name a few television and radio outlets. I have given talks and participated in panel discussions at Princeton, New America, John Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, Harvard University and many other institutions in the US and Europe.