Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City in 1983 to a Lebanese-Palestinian father and an Iraqi-German mother, and educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and currently lives in London, where he advises on inclusion of refugees, women, and young people in the transition and peace processes of the Arab Spring.

“I was two people now, in two separate realities, where the rules in one were suspended and diferent from those in the other.” Set in an unnamed Middle Eastern country across the course of one day, Guapa follows the story of Rasa, a young gay man who has been caught in bed with a boyfriend by his overbearing grandmother. As he carries out an average day translating for foreign journalists, Rasa exists against a backdrop of civil unrest, heavy-handed police and homophobia.

Faced with the prospect of never seeing his lover again, the novel gives us an insight into how it feels to be in love in a society where that love remains strongly forbidden. “I dreamt of kissing his cheek, because it struck me that to kiss your lover’s cheek in public was quite ordinary,” Rasa writes, sharing his painful desire and longing in a story that is equal parts romance and thriller.

Through flashbacks, we learn of Rasa’s younger life; his parents deaths, his awakening sexuality,

and his time studying in the U.S., where he is distrusted in the wake of terror attacks in the west. Saleem Haddad is London based, but in this novel he draws on his Middle Eastern heritage

to paint a truthful image of the manifestations and perceptions of homosexuality within Arab culture. His background as an aid worker, and in assisting refugees from the region, only further enhances his understanding of the wider problems he discusses; notably the fallout from the Arab Spring, and the rise of Islamic extremism. Guapa sets Haddad up as a literary voice capable of narrating untold stories of the modern gay experience, from one of the most complicated parts of the world.

------ Attitude Magazine