Layla AlAmmar

Layla AlAmmar is a writer and academic from Kuwait. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. Her short stories have appeared in the Evening Standard, The Red Letters St Andrews Prose Journal, and Aesthetica Magazine where she was a finalist for the Creative Writing Award 2014. She was 2018 British Council International Writer in Residence at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival. She has also written for The Guardian and Arablit Quarterly. Her debut novel The Pact We Made (2019) was long-listed for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and nominated for the First Book Award at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Her second novel, Silence is a Sense, was published in 2021 and the paperback comes out March 2022. She is pursuing a PhD on the intersection of Arab women’s fiction and literary trauma theory.