Deborah Campbell is the author of two books of narrative nonfiction about people in extraordinary situations, most recently A Disappearance in Damascus. This won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, Canada’s leading prize for nonfiction, and the Hubert Evans Award for Creative Nonfiction. A Disappearance was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a book of the year for many publications, optioned for screen, and adopted for university courses.

Published in seven languages and a dozen countries, Deborah Campbell has written for Harper’s, The Guardian, The Economist, Foreign Policy, New Scientist, The Walrus, The New York Times and others. She has worked in many countries, including Mexico, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, immersing herself in the societies she writes about. She is the winner of three National Magazine Awards and in 2017 received the Freedom to Read Award from the Writers Union of Canada for her body of work.

She has spoken at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, the Munk Centre for International Affairs, the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the National Press Club in Washington DC, the Knight-Wallace Fellowship in Ann Arbor, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and at numerous book festivals and literary events.

Born near Vancouver, British Columbia, Deborah Campbell has lived in Paris and the Middle East. She is an Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, where she holds the Lansdowne Chair in Fine Arts. She lives in Canada’s Gulf Islands with her husband, author Ronald Wright.