Nather Henafe Alali is a Syrian-German writer, journalist, and documentary film concept writer. Born in Syria, he studied dentistry until 2012 when he was imprisoned by the Assad regime. His family managed to secure his release, but his education was cut short, and he was forced to leave his homeland.
In Syria, he worked as a field reporter and essayist, contributing to Syrian online media and supporting humanitarian efforts for Syrian and international NGOs within Syria and Turkey. He fled to Germany in 2014, where he continued his journalistic career. From 2016 to 2017, he was a columnist for Der Spiegel.
In 2018, Alali edited a special issue of Neue Rundschau (S. Fischer Verlag), bringing together Syrian and German voices on the question: The Syrian Revolution: A Revolution of Media? His first novel, Raum Ohne Fenster (S. Fischer Verlag), depicts the devastation of war and authoritarianism, telling a story of loss, exhaustion, and the stripping away of one鈥檚 homeland.
He published Letters to an Unknown in Neue Rundschau in 2019 and was awarded a Roger Willemsen Foundation scholarship in June 2020. His second novel, Die Kaffeesatzleserin, was published in Arabic in Beirut in 2021, featuring a story that explores themes of love, art, and politics.