Rasha Omran

Rasha Omran is a Syrian poet, living in exile in Cairo since 2012. She is known as the author of seven poetry collections and an anthology of Syrian poetry in Arabic. Some of her poems have been published in English, Catalan, French, German and Italian.

Through her public commentaries about Arab culture and intellectual life, Omran became known as a critic of the former regime under Bashar al-Assad and the failure of Arab intellectuals to criticise its crimes.

Biography Rasha Omran was born in 1964 in Tartus, Syria, into a family of Alawite artists. She is the daughter of Syrian poet Mohammad Omran, a poet, activist, and journalist, and their home was a cultural gathering place for intellectuals and artists. As a child, she read freely in her family library and she later attended Damascus University to study Arabic literature. She founded the Al-Sindiyan Festival of Literature and Culture in her hometown in the late 1990s, which she directed for 16 years, and published her first poems after the death of her father. She has published seven collections of poetry and is the editor of an anthology of contemporary Syrian poetry.

Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, she publicly expressed her support for the uprising, saying "This is a dictatorial regime, [....] How can I support a government that kills its citizens?" She has marched in protests, written about her dissent, and spoken out against Bashar al-Assad, calling him "not a dictator, just a gangster boss." Omran also coined the phrase, "the international silence on Syria is deafening." Threatened along with her family by the Syrian regime, she went into exile in Cairo in 2012. In September 2012, Omran and four other Syrian women launched a hunger strike outside the Arab League's headquarters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, demanding that the Arab League provide more support for the revolutionaries and pressure Assad to halt the human rights abuses in Syria.

Omran has lived in Cairo since 2012 where she continues to write and publish her poetry, as well as three weekly articles for online Arab media, where she comments on political and cultural news. Poems from A Secret Wife of Absence Defy the Silence If I Were a Cat (in English and French) When longing tormented me

Reception A 2016 interview in the New York Review mentioned Omran's public commentaries about Arab culture and intellectual life, where she criticized the former regime under Bashar al-Assad and the failure of Arab intellectuals to protest against its crimes.

The German website for international poetry Lyrikline published two of Omran's poems, including “كأنني مشعوذة العزلة” (As if I were a juggler of solitude) both in the original Arabic script and as audio recordings, as well as in German translation.