Mona Awad

Writing

Born: August 22, 1978

Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Mona Awad is a Canadian novelist and short-story writer. Her debut book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, a novel about a woman's lifelong struggle with body image issues, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2016. Her novel, Bunny (published in June, 2019 by Viking Press), was optioned for film by Bad Robot Productions in 2023. It tells the story of a girl named Samantha Mackey who attends a prestigious graduate program located in New England, at the fictional Warren University. There, Samantha finds herself entangled in the weird rituals led by the "Bunnies"—her fellow students who are more than just the clique that they seem on the surface. Her third novel, All's Well, was released on August 3, 2021 by Simon & Schuster. She has worked as an assistant professor at Syracuse University since 2020.