Suad Amiry
سعاد العامري
Architect and writer
Founder of Riwaq, the first organisation dedicated to conserving Palestinian architectural heritage, and author of a curfew diary that won Italy's Viareggio Prize.
Suad Amiry was born in 1951 in Ramallah and spent part of her childhood in Amman. She trained as an architect at the American University of Beirut, the University of Michigan, and the University of Edinburgh, and made the historic built fabric of Palestine — village houses, courtyards, town centres — her subject at a time when it had no institutional protection at all.
In 1991 she founded Riwaq, the Centre for Architectural Conservation, the first body of its kind working on the documentation, protection, and rehabilitation of Palestinian architectural heritage. Riwaq’s method has been to register buildings first and restore afterwards, on the argument that what has not been surveyed cannot be defended; its rehabilitation of the historic centre of Birzeit received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2013. Amiry also served on the Palestinian delegation to the Washington peace talks from 1991 to 1993, and coordinated the Jerusalem programme of the Smithsonian Institution’s 1993 Folklife Festival.
Her writing came out of the same period, and out of confinement. Sharon and My Mother-in-Law recounts the weeks of curfew in Ramallah during the 2002 Israeli reinvasion — with an octogenarian mother-in-law installed in her house — in a register of domestic comedy that sharpens rather than softens the account. It won the Viareggio Prize in Italy in 2004 and has been translated into nineteen languages.
Selected works
- Founding of Riwaq — Centre for Architectural Conservation (1991)
- Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2004)
- Riwaq’s Registry of Historic Buildings in Palestine
Sources
Further reading
An external biography or archive holding more on this life than the entry above.