Alaa Al-Musalli
IraqAbout
Alaa Al-Musalli is an Iraqi-born writer, academic, and professor of communication and media at Capilano University in British Columbia, Canada. Having grown up in Iraq, she witnessed the wars and political upheavals that later inspired her fiction. She holds a master’s degree in English and Linguistics from Baghdad University and a PhD in Linguistics from Bangor University in Wales. She also graduated from Simon Fraser University’s Writers’ Studio program in 2019 and completed its Graduate TWS Workshop in 2023. Before publishing her debut novel, Al-Musalli wrote short stories shaped by her experiences of war, including Ghost in the Sky and The Inconvenient Oath. Her debut, The Age of Silence (2026), draws on real events and family history to explore dictatorship, motherhood, and the emotional toll of conflict. Describing herself as an antiwar writer, she seeks to give a voice to mothers and other people whose suffering is often overlooked in accounts of war. She lives in Vancouver, Canada.
