Haifa Zangana is a novelist and columnist. She has been both a prisoner of Saddam Hussein’s regime and an adviser to the United Nations Development Programme.

Born in Baghdad in 1950, she graduated from Baghdad University as a pharmacist after being imprisoned by the Ba’athist regime. When she finished her education, she worked with the PLO in Damascus, Syria, as a managed of their pharmaceutical unit, in 1975, and moved to London, where she has lived since 1976. She has worked as an adviser for the United Nations Development Programme, writing a report on empowerment of women in the Arab world, and as a member of the advisory board of a Brussels tribunal on Iraq. She co-founded Act Together: Women's Action for Iraq and is the chair of Iraqi Patriots in Media and Culture (IPMC).\

Through the Vast Halls of Memory, her biographical novel, was published in English by Hourglass in 1990, reprinted in 1991, and published in Arabic in 1995. Three collections of short stories followed: The Ant’s Nest (1996), Beyond What the Eye Sees (1997) and The Presence of Others (1999). She has since published two more novels: Keys to a City in 2000 and Women on a Journey in 2001, which has recently been translated into English. She was a founding member of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (IACIS), and edited and published Halabja, a homage to the Kurdish town by Iraqi and Arab writers and artists.

She is a weekly columnist for al-Quds newspaper and an occasional commentator for the Guardian, Red Pepper and al-Ahram Weekly. She lectures regularly on Iraqi culture, literature, and women’s issues. Her essays have appeared in Not One More Death (Verso 2006), Empire’s Law (Pluto, 2006), Barriers to Reconciliation (Washington DC University Press, 2006) and War With No End (Verso, 2007). Her short history of women in Iraq was published by Seven Stories in 2007 as City of Widows. 

She has also exhibited her paintings in various European and American surrealist publications and group exhibitions in the 80s, and performed one-woman shows in London and Iceland.