Karim Alrawi

Karim Alrawi (Arabic كريم الراوي) is a writer born in Alexandria, Egypt. His family emigrated to England then to Canada. Alrawi graduated from University College London and the University of Manchester, England. He gained an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa.

In the UK, after his first full-length stage play Migrations won the prestigious John Whiting Award he became Literary Manager of the Theatre Royal Stratford East and later Resident Writer at the Royal Court Theatre in Central London. He moved to Egypt, where he taught in the theatre department of the American University in Cairo. In Egypt his plays were banned by the state censor. He was arrested and detained for interrogation by Egyptian State Security about his writings and for his work with the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR). As a Fulbright International Scholar he moved to the United States. He later took positions as Writer in Residence at Meadow Brook Theatre (MBT) in Michigan and Editor in Chief of ARABICA magazine, the leading nationally distributed Arab-American publication with a certified readership of over 100,000 readers. Subsequently, Alrawi supervised aid and development projects in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, for the Canadian Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society, where he was Director of International Programs, the US-Arab Economic Forum, where he was Executive Director and the World Bank as Communications Advisor and Manager of External Affairs for the Middle East and North Africa.