Nejmeh Khalil-Habib was born in Haifa, Palestine and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She graduated with a BA from the Arab University, Beirut in 1970 and received an MA from the Lebanese University, Beirut in 1991. Since moving to Australia with her family, Habib has been the editor of the Australian-Arabic literary magazine,
Joussour. Her short stories have been published in several Australian-Arabic newspapers and journals and two Arabic- language collections have been published in Lebanon: their titles translatable into English as
A
Spring That Didn't Blossom (2003) and
And the Children Suffer (2001). She has also written a critical study of Ghassan Kanafani (1999) and a study of Australian literature, which incorporates a section 'Literary Faces from Contemporary Australia', aiming to introduce some aspects and figures of Australian culture and literature to the Arabic-language reader.
