Asmaa Alghoul was born in 1982 in Rafah, in a Palestinian refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. A regular contributor to Al-Monitor, an information site that deals with news from the Middle East, she currently lives in France where she is writing her next book. She has won numerous international awards, including the Human Rights Watch Hellman / Hammett Award, the Dubai Press Club prize for journalism, and the International Women's Media Foundation Journalism Award.