Nihad Sirees

Nihad Sirees was born in 1950 in Aleppo, Syria. An engineer, he has been a novelist, playwright and screenwriter since the 1980s. 

His successful television dramas include the “The Silk Market” depicting the political and social turmoil of the 1950s and the rise of the Baath party and one of his film series was about the Lebanese-born artist and philosopher Kahlil Gibran.

His novel “The Silence and the Roar”, banned in Syria, has recently been published in German and French and will be published in English in early 2013 by Pushkin Press in the UK and Other Press in the USA. After increasing surveillance and pressure from the Syrian government, Nihad Sirees left Syria in 2012. He is currently at Brown University in the US on an International Writers Fellowship until the end of February 2013.