Mona Awad Books in Order

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and grew up there, later spending part of her teens in Ontario. Born to a French Canadian mother and an Egyptian father, she has often spoken about feeling a little out of step with the worlds around her. That uneasy, observant outsider feeling runs through much of her fiction.

Writing started early, but it did not become a straight, tidy career. As a student at York University's Glendon Campus, she wrote her first poems and had what she described as her first real creative breakthrough in a writing class. One poem about body image stayed with her for years and eventually became the seed of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl.

She took the long way there.

Before her novels found a wide readership, Awad worked a string of bookish and writerly jobs. She sold books in Toronto, Salt Lake City, and Edinburgh, worked as a freelance journalist, and wrote a food column in Montreal. She also kept studying, earning an MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh, an MFA in fiction from Brown University, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English literature from the University of Denver.

Her debut, 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, brought many of her recurring concerns into focus: shame, performance, appetite, self-scrutiny, and the strange cruelty of wanting to be approved of. Through linked episodes, the book follows Lizzie as body image shapes friendships, romance, and the way she sees herself. It won the Amazon Best First Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.

Then the work got stranger.

In Bunny, an isolated scholarship student gets pulled into the sugary, menacing orbit of a clique in an elite MFA program. In All's Well, a theater professor living with chronic pain tries to stage Shakespeare while her body, students, and career all push back. Awad has said her own years of chronic pain helped shape that novel. In Rouge, a grieving daughter follows beauty culture, mirrors, and old wounds into something close to a fairy tale and very far from safety.

Across these books, Awad returns to lonely women, hungry friendships, private obsessions, and the pressure to transform yourself into someone more lovable, beautiful, or acceptable. She likes closed worlds, campuses, rehearsal rooms, beauty cults, and social scenes that feel just one step away from horror. Humor matters, too. Even when the subject is pain, envy, or self-loathing, her sentences often carry a sly joke or a sharp turn of satire.

Awad has also taught creative writing at Brown, the University of Denver, Tufts, Framingham State, and UMass Amherst. She now teaches fiction at Syracuse University and divides her time between La Jolla and Boston. That mix of academic life, fairy tale logic, and dark comedy feels very true to her work.