Short Bio

Mona Awad is the bestselling author of the novels Rouge, All’s Well, Bunny, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl. She is a three-time finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award, the recipient of an Amazon Best First Novel Award, and she was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. Bunny was a finalist for a New England Book Award and was named a Best Book of 2019 by Time, Vogue, and the New York Public Library. It is currently being developed for film with Bad Robot Productions. Rouge is being adapted for film by Fremantle and Sinestra. Margaret Atwood named Awad her “literary heir” in The New York Times’s T Magazine. She teaches fiction in the creative writing program at Syracuse University and is based in Boston. Her work has been translated into fifteen languages. Her next novel, We Love You, Bunny, will be released on September 23, 2025 with Simon & Schuster.

Long Bio

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and has lived in the US since 2009. Her debut novel, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL (Penguin, 2016), won the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Arab American Book Award. It was also long-listed for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the International Dublin Award. BUNNY, her second novel (Viking, 2019), was a finalist for a GoodReads Choice Award for Best Horror, the New England Book Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, and it won The Ladies of Horror Fiction Best Novel Award. It is currently under option with Bad Robot Productions. Her third novel, ALL’S WELL, released in the summer of 2021, was longlisted for the International Dublin Award and was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Horror. Her fourth novel, ROUGE, was an international bestseller and is currently under option for film with Fremantle and Sinestra productions.

WE LOVE YOU, BUNNY, her latest, is forthcoming in September with Simon & Schuster.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, McSweeney’s, TIME magazine, Ploughshares, The Walrus, Maisonneuve and elsewhere.

Mona has taught creative writing at Brown University, the University of Denver, Framingham State, Tufts and in the MFA program at UMass Amherst where she served as a Visiting Writer. She has worked as a bookseller for various independent bookstores including Pages in Toronto, The King's English Bookshop in Salt Lake City and Blackwell Books in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a freelance journalist and a food columnist for the Montreal-based magazine Maisonneuve. 

She earned an MFA in fiction from Brown University and an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh where her dissertation was on fear in the fairy tale. She completed a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English literature at the University of Denver. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University.

She lives in Boston.