About the Author

Hasan Ali Chamas

A writer, activist, and academic whose first book began as a love letter and became a reckoning with faith, sectarianism, and a homeland in collapse.

Hasan Ali Chamas was born in 1990 in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of southern Beirut, in the middle of Lebanon's civil war — the son of a carpenter father and a homemaker mother who dreamed her firstborn would one day be called "Doctor." He grew up between an Islamic school in Haret Hreik and his father's furniture workshop, where he spent his summers among sawdust and the voices of laborers.

In 2008 he was accepted to the Lebanese American University, stepping for the first time out of what he calls his "small bubble" to meet students from every sect and background, against the backdrop of the political turmoil that shook Lebanon between 2008 and 2011. In 2012, at twenty-one, he traveled alone to the United Kingdom for a Master's degree at the University of Bradford — and it was there, in a university café, that a single sentence to a stranger became the story you can now read in You Are From Paradise.

Hasan has also spent much of his adult life as a civic organizer in Lebanon. He was a founding member and key organizer of the 2015 "You Reek" (طلعت ريحتكم) campaign against the country's garbage crisis, later serving as secretary-general of the opposition party Sabaa (سبعة), and was a direct participant in — and casualty of — the October 17, 2019 uprising and the collapse of the Lebanese lira that followed.

2015 – 2024

Wrote You Are From Paradise over nine years, beginning in Beirut as a direct reaction to his own love story, and continuing across Istanbul and Manchester before finishing it.

2019

Active participant in Lebanon's October 17 uprising against corruption and the political class, and one of the many ordinary citizens whose savings were caught in the collapse of the banking system.

2024

Completed the manuscript from an apartment in Niagara Falls, Canada, where he now lives and serves as dean of a data science department.

Today

Publishing You Are From Paradise in both Arabic and English, and continuing to write about love, sectarianism, and the country he left only after it was exhausted by corruption and collapse.

"Read my story," he writes in the book's introduction, "and perhaps you will find in it something of your own. That is my aim, and my intent."

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