Sorayya is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir (2022), which she wrote after her mother’s death, and three novels, Noor (2004), Five Queen’s Road (2009), and City of Spies (2015), which won Best International Fiction Award at the Sharjah Book Fair (2016). Sorayya’s writing has appeared in Guernica, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, The Malahat Review, Journal of Narrative Politics, and several other magazines and anthologies. She is the winner of a Malahat Review Novella Prize for “In the Shadows of the Margalla Hills,” an early imagining of a central event in City of Spies. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award which took her to Bangladesh and Pakistan in order to research Noor –and changed her understanding of humanity and war. Some years ago, before she realized she would write non-fiction, she received a grant from a local arts foundation that sent her to Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where she interviewed tsunami survivors and learned more about love and resilience than she could have imagined.
