Mona Awad Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mona Awad is an award winning and bestselling author of literary fiction.
Her writing has been featured in a variety of publications such as Maisonneuve, The New York Times, The Walrus, Vogue, Ploughshares, McSweeney’s and TIME magazine. She has also been nominated and won several awards for her fiction works over the years.

Mona has taught creative writing at the University of Denver, Brown University and has been a Visiting Writer at the UMass Amherst MFA program. Before she became an author, she was a bookseller for the likes of Blackwell Books in Edinburgh and The Kings English Bookshop and Pages in Toronto.

Mona got her MScR in English from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from Brown University. She would then get her doctorate in English literature and Creative Writing from the University of Denver.

She now works at the Syracuse University Creative Writing program as an assistant professor.

In a recent interview, Mona Awad who was born and raised in Montreal in Canada but now lives in the United States said that she always felt like an outsider. She was born to a Canadian French mother of Irish Serbian descent and a Muslim Egyptian father.

While she was never baptized, she attended an English Catholic school. Neither of her parents taught her their native languages which is why she always felt like an outsider even in her own family spaces. Since she could not fit in, she became very observant at an early age and started writing what she heard and saw.

During this time, she loved writing skits and this is how she got into writing. She would eventually gravitate towards poetry in which she credits “HOWL,” by Allen Ginsberg as being responsible for motivating her to take her writing seriously.

In her teenage years, she was also a huge fan of the Margaret Atwood novels and this would also be a significant influence on her later writing career.

Mona Awad made her debut when she published “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” in 2016. The story which tells of a woman’s struggle with body image was inspired by Mona’s experiences struggling up with body image issues.

The novel was the winner of the First Novel Award on Amazon Kindle and made the shortlist for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Having also struggled with chronic pain for years due to a hip injury she penned the blockbuster novel “All’s Well.” Post surgery for her hip injury, Mona had a tough recovery and injured her back which resulted in neurological issues with her legs.

Tasks she once thought nothing of such as bending down to retrieve socks from the sock drawer, driving to the supermarket or sitting at a desk were suddenly impossible.

When she was writing her novel, she wanted to explore living with such a condition. The novel chronicled how pain can affect many aspects of everyday relationships and life such as friendships, romance and career among other things.

“Bunny” by Mona Awad is the story of Samantha Heather Mackey who is a student at Warren University’s small and highly selective MFA program. She feels like an outsider and usually prefers her own company and dark imagination to the company of her fellow students.

Most of the students are unbearably entitled and rich girls that usually refer to each other as Bunny and seem to speak and move as one. But everything changes when Samantha is invited to Smut Salon, the Bunny headquarters and cannot resist, as she ditches Ava who so far has been her only friend.

Plunging deeper into the saccharine and sinister world of the Bunnies, she starts taking part in the “Workshop.” This is an off campus ritual where the girls come up with monstrous creations that blur the edges of reality. It is soon evident that her friendships with the Bunnies and with Ava will come into a deadly collision.
It is a spellbinding novel that goes down the rabbit hole of desire, loneliness, friendship and belonging, while also exploring the terrible and fantastic power of imagination.

Mona Awad’s novel “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl” introduces Lizzie, a young woman from the suburban hell of Mississauga. She has never liked her appearance and even though Mel, her best friend, believes she is the prettier of the two, she does not believe her.

She has recently set up an online dating profile but has yet to upload any pictures even when China her friend does her makeup. Lizzie thinks no one would ever desire her or even worse people could start teasing her.

She believes the only solution to her problems is losing weight and so she starts counting miles jogged, calories consumed and pounds dropped.
It is not long before she starts fitting into dresses she always loved and becomes thin which attracts double edged validation from her reflection in the mirror, her husband, her mother and friends.

The problem is that she still sees herself as a fat girl no matter how much weight she loses. It is a hilarious, brilliant and sometimes shocking story as Mona explores a body image obsessed culture.

“All’s Well” by Mona Awad is a darkly funny novel about chronic pain. The lead is a professor of theater who is staging one of the most aligned plays by Shakesp[eare while dealing with chronic pain.

Miranda Fitch is living a nightmare following an accident that left her with chronic and excruciating back pain and ultimately cost her marriage. She is now dependent on painkillers and is just about to lose her latest job as theater director at a college.

While she is driven and motivated to put on a good showing for her Shakespearean play, she still has to deal with a mutinous cast that prefers “Macbeth” to “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Her chance at redemption may just slip through her fingers if she cannot turn things around.

Just when she thinks she has lost everything, three benefactors come into her life with an eerie knowledge of her past. They also offer tantalizing promises where her mutinous thespians get what’s coming to them and her play goes on. They even promise to get rid of the chronic pain that has plagued her for months