Anonymous Baghdad blogger whose Baghdad Burning was the first blook (book composed of blogs) to be nominated for the UK’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Riverbend represents a face of Iraq rarely seen in the English-language media. She also won the Lettre Ulysse prize for Literary Reportage.
As she writes in her blog, she is from a mixed Sunni-Shia family who balance their faith with a modern, tolerant outlook. Riverbend worked as a computer programmer before the US invasion in 2003, one of the many tens of thousands of middle-class, urban Iraqi women who had entered the professions under Saddam Hussein’s programme of secularisation.
While not a Ba’athist apologist, Riverbend’s blog concentrates on both the acute and gradual attrition of Baghdadi society under the US occupation, from the rise of religious fundamentalism meaning she would have to wear a hijab to work to the increasing rate of rape and other violent crimes on the streets.
After four years of charting American outrages, sectarian violence, family life and the gradual erasure of any security in her world, Riverbend and her family moved to Damascus, Syria, at which point she ceased posting. In that time, she had collected her blogs in two books, published in English by the Feminist Press, and become the voice of a generation in Iraq.
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