Sanaa Aoun

In residence: June 2021

Sanaa Aoun is an author and teacher from Damascus, Syria and came to Tromsø, Norway as a free city author in 2016. Aoun has published two collections of short stories in Arabic, Red Lifelines (2007) and To Where the Compass Points (2018), and continues to be a regular contributor to Arabic online newspapers. In Norwegian, her texts have been published in Klassekampen and in the anthology For Folk Flest (2017). In June 2018, her monologue A Half Woman was performed at Hålogaland Theater. Several of her texts have been translated into English and German.

Aoun’s writing is characterised by the sense of the absurd, the unexpected and a constant stretching of the boundary between fantasy and reality. In her stories, Aoun examines gender roles and artistic roles against a cosmopolitan background ravaged by war.

Watch Aoun reading an excerpt from her short story The Little Prince's Last Journey here.