AustLit

'Nada Awar Jarrar is a Lebanese Australian author. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the Anglo•Lebanese exile literature. When she was a child, she had to leave Lebanon because of the civil war (1975-90). She lived in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States before settling in Lebanon in 1995. In 2006, the thirty-three-day war with Israel broke out, and she fled to the mountains of Lebanon. She wrote Unsafe Haven in 2016 while residing in Beirut at the time of the Syrian war. Nearly all the novel's characters are displaced by wars in their homelands, and through their stories, Jarrar explores the different effects of displacement. Her protagonist describes how the whole Middle East region has been in turmoil, and people "find themselves disconnected and dependent on whatever and whomever provides reprieve from this state of drifting" (80). Displaced during the civil war, she flees to Cyprus for part of her life.' (Introduction(