Sahar Mustafah

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, an inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her first novel The Beauty of Your Face (W.W. Norton, 2020) was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Los Angeles Times United We Read selection, and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was long-listed for the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize, and is currently a finalist for Chicago Writers Association Best Book of the Year award and the Chicago Review of Books award. It was recently selected for the Great Group Reads for National Reading Group Month. Her short story collection Code of the West was the winner of the 2016 Willow Books Fiction Award. Her stories have earned a Distinguished Story citation from Best American Short Stories 2016, First Place in Fiction from the Guild Literary Complex of Chicago, and three Pushcart Prize nominations, among other honors. Mustafah earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago where she was the recipient of the David Friedman Award for Best Fiction. She writes and teaches outside of Chicago.