The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria

FEATURING ALIA MALEK – The nation of Syria was once associated with beauty, culture, history, and, sadly, a long-term dictatorship. Today, it is synonymous with war, destruction, and refugees.

It is rare for us here in the West to hear about the impact of the Syrian crisis from the perspective of a Syrian and a journalist. Today we’ll turn to just such a person who has written a searing political and personal story of her country.

Find about her book and work at www.AliaMalek.com.

Alia Malek, Syrian American journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, the Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, Jadaliyya, McSweeney’s, Guernica and other publications. She is the author of A Country Called Amreeka: US History Re-Told Through Arab American Lives (Simon & Schuster 2009) and editor of Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post 9/11 Injustices. She was also a Senior Writer at Al Jazeera America and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. In April 2011, she moved to Damascus, Syria and wrote anonymously for several outlets from inside the country as it began to disintegrate. Her reporting from Syria earned her the Marie Colvin Award in November 2013. Her newest book is called The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir of Syria.

**This interview was originally broadcast on March 3, 2017.