All She Lost: The Explosion in Lebanon, the Collapse of a Nation and the Women Who Survive by Dalal Mawad

'Poignant and compelling... will resonate with anyone who cares about justice and the abuse of power' - Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News International Editor and author of Sandstorm

'Essential and urgent' - Kim Ghattas, journalist and author of Black Wave

Lebanon and the wider Middle East is in crisis. For this extraordinary book, j ournalist Dalal Mawad conducted a series of searing interviews with women in Lebanon - weaving an extraordinary story of survival, corruption and impunity.

On August 4 2020, a huge explosion in the heart of Beirut killed hundreds of people - it was the apocalypse of a sequence of events that have led to Lebanon's unprecedented collapse. Award-winning journalist Dalal Mawad was in Lebanon when the blast happened, and was one of the first journalists to report on the mysterious and devastating explosion.

During her reporting, she discovered something else - that it is the women who stay behind, and it is through their stories that the history of the Middle East must be re-constructed. She set out to record the stories of those she met, the women long discriminated against, and those whose stories are untold.

She spoke to mothers who lost their children, spouses who lost their partners, refugee women who have fled from the war in Syria - and who now find themselves in another failing state. We hear from the Lebanese grandmother, bankrupted by the small nation's collapse, who remembers Beirut's glory days of the 1960s - when the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Miles Davis came to Beirut. And then the women like Dalal herself, who have left their home behind.

The women in this book all experienced the explosion and suffered unimaginable loss and tragedy, but it is not just this one event that brings them together. Their personal stories converged to tell the story of a nation whose glory days are long gone, now riven by protracted violence, lurching from crisis to crisis, and fighting to survive. It tells not only of what these women have lost, but also what Lebanon has lost, and a part of the Middle East that is no more.

Dalal Mawad is an independent award-winning Lebanese journalist based in Paris, France. She is working as freelance producer for CNN in Paris and as a part-time journalism professor at Sciences Po. Mawad was a senior producer with the Associated Press based in Lebanon when twin blasts rocked Beirut on August 4th 2020. She extensively covered the explosion and its aftermath as well as Lebanon's economic and financial crisis since 2019. Her AP bylines have been published in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Mawad is the winner of the Samir Kassir Award for the Freedom of the Press in 2020 for her short film on a transgender woman in Lebanon, and was a finalist in 2012 for an investigative story on Lebanon's Jews. Mawad has also worked as a regional video producer for the United Nations Refugee Agency covering displacement in the Middle East and the world. Previous to her work at the UN, she was an on-air reporter with LBCI, a Lebanese broadcaster, where she mainly covered human rights and gender-based violence.

She has a Master's degree in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and another Master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University in New York where she was awarded the Joan Konner award for outstanding reporting for Television and Radio. She is fluent in Arabic, French, English and Spanish.

Year: 2024

Hardcover