Yara El-Ghadban

Yara El-Ghadban (; born 1976) is a Palestinian-Canadian anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, novelist, translator and essayist. She was born into a family of Palestinian refugees from Lebanon and Syria.

Biography Yara El-Ghadban was born in 1976 in Dubai to Palestinian refugee parents. Her father was an engineer and her mother a specialist in Arabic literature. She lived successively in exile in Buenos Aires, Beirut, Sana'a and London, until her family settled in Montreal in 1989. After doctoral studies in anthropology and music at the University of Montreal, she taught at the University of Montreal and the University of Ottawa.

In 2017, she became president of the organization "Espace de la diversité".

In 2020, she held a writing residency, which she entitled "Manifestos before dawn", within the journal Mœbius , from which four texts resulted in issues 164 to 167.

In spring 2022, the magazine published in its issue 184.

In 2023, interviewed by Philosophie Magazine, as a Palestinian author, she discusses her relationship with the imagination, writing and Palestine in her novel The Dance of the Pink Flamingos: "In this novel, I dare to reverse the discourse and imagine a context where Palestine is the only place where we can still live on the planet. I wanted to create a parallel universe to show that another world is possible if we have the courage to imagine it. I am often asked how I can still keep hope but, it's very simple, that's all I have left!".