Mona Eltahawy

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues. She is based in New York.

Her opinion pieces have been published frequently in media across the world, including The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune and she has appeared as a guest analyst in several media outlets. She was a columnist for the Toronto Star, Jerusalem Report and Politiken until 2011 since when her columns have appeared in the Guardian.

During the 18-day revolution that toppled Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, she appeared on most major media outlets, leading the feminist website Jezebel to describe her as "The Woman Explaining Egypt to the West". In November 2011, Egyptian riot police beat her, breaking her left arm and right hand, and sexually assaulted her and she was detained for 12 hours by the Interior Ministry and Military Intelligence.

Newsweek magazine named Ms. Eltahawy one of its "150 Fearless Women of 2012," Time magazine featured her along with other activists from around the world as its People of the Year, and Arabian Business magazine named her one of the 100 Most Powerful Arab Women.

Before she moved to the U.S. in 2000, Ms. Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, including almost six years as a Reuters correspondent, and she reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China.

In 2012, the Missouri School of Journalism awarded her its Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review named her as one of 20 women in the media to watch. In 2010 the Anna Lindh Foundation awarded her its Special Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Journalism and the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver gave her its Anvil of Freedom Award. In 2009, the European Union awarded her its Samir Kassir Prize for Freedom of the Press for her opinion writing and Search for Common Ground named her a winner of its Eliav-Sartawi Award for Middle Eastern Journalism.

Mona was born on August 1, 1967 in Port Said, Egypt and has lived in the U.K, Saudi Arabia and Israel. She calls herself a proud liberal Muslim. In 2005, she was named a Muslim Leader of Tomorrow by the American Society for Muslim Advancement and she is a member of the Communications Advisory Group for Musawah, the global movement for justice and equality in the Muslim family.