Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Hara Hotel
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.teresathornhill.com/thornhill/home.php
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COUNTRY:
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RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: nr 94024438
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/nr94024438
HEADING: Thornhill, Teresa
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100 10 |a Thornhill, Teresa
670 __ |a Making women talk, 1992: |b t.p. (Teresa Thornhill) cover p. 4 (barrister in criminal and family law, London)
953 __ |a xx00
985 __ |c RLIN |e LSPC
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Holds bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree, and a law degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Attorney and writer. Barrister specializing in child protection law.
WRITINGS
Also, author of Making Women Talk: The Interrogation of Palestinian Women Prisoners and Donkey Business: A Pyrenean Adventure of the Heart.
SIDELIGHTS
Teresa Thornhill is a British writer and attorney. She has worked as a barrister, specializing in child protection law. Thornhill has spent significant amounts of time in Latin America and the Middle East and has written about her travels. She is the author of books, including Making Women Talk: The Interrogation of Palestinian Women Prisoners, Donkey Business: A Pyrenean Adventure of the Heart, and The Curtain Maker of Beirut: Conservations with the Lebanese.
Sweet Tea with Cardamom
In 1997, Thornhill released Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey through Iraqi Kurdistan. In this volume, she recalls her travels in the region and offers excerpts from interviews with women she has met there. Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular woman or girl. Thornhill’s interviewees reflect on what life is like for them under a strict regime led by Saddam Hussein. One women explains the concept of shame and honor that deeply affects the lives of Iraqi Kurds. She tells of a fourteen-year-old girl who was raped by a gang of men she did not know. In order to protect the family’s honor, the girl’s mother was forced to kill her. In other interviews, Thornhill speaks with women about the political situation in Iraq. Many of them tell her they wish that Hussein was out of power and that Iraq could be governed in a more democratic fashion.
Stephanie Papa, reviewer in Library Journal, offered a favorable assessment of Sweet Tea with Cardamom. Papa commented: “Thornhill’s warm, descriptive prose [makes] this book hard to put down.”
Hara Hotel
Thornhill speaks with a different group of oppressed people in her 2018 book, Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece. She discusses her feelings of empathy for the refugees and offers information about the hardships they have experienced. Thornhill recalls deciding to join a volunteer group from Norway that was going to Greece to offer help to the refugees. She believed her fluency in Arabic could be of use. The area that the volunteer group would serve was nicknamed the Hara Hotel. Thornhill served residents of the Hara Hotel in 2016. In the book, she tells the harrowing stories of the people she met there, including man named Juwan Azad.
Referring to Thornhill, a Kirkus Reviews critic suggested: “What she learned might not feel revelatory to knowledgeable diplomats, but it will certainly enlighten casual followers of that nation’s bloodshed.” The same critic described Hara Hotel as “a brave, affecting book about a continuing humanitarian crisis.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece.
Library Journal, August, 1998, Stephanie Papa, review of Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey Through Iraqi Kurdistan, p. 120.
ONLINE
London Review Bookshop website, https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/ (June 5, 2018), author profile.
Teresa Thornhill website, http://www.teresathornhill.com/ (June 5, 2018).
Bio
Bio
At 19, I set off for South America, armed only with fluent Spanish and a love of Latin American fiction. I hitched a passage from Spain to the Caribbean on a privately owned yacht. From there I made my way to Peru. For a few weeks I experienced the excitement and the loneliness of travelling solo, until a Peruvian social worker took me under her wing and invited me to live with her and her family. In Lima, I became a volunteer community worker in a shanty town and saw people living in poverty and squalor for the first time.
Back in England a year later, I took a degree in Philosophy and Spanish, began writing short stories and trained as a criminal and family lawyer. In 1989 I spent an eight month sabbatical in the West Bank and Gaza, where I learned Palestinian Arabic and interviewed Palestinian and Israeli ex-detainees for my first book, Making Women Talk: the Interrogation of Palestinian Women Prisoners. I spent a lot of time drinking tea with and listening to Palestinians on the porches of their houses. Within a few months I had acquired a lasting fascination with the complexities and contradictions of the Middle East.
In the 1990s I began to specialize in child protection law, which enabled me to practice part time. This was harrowing work, but it felt worthwhile and my quiet days at home writing gave me respite. In 1993 I travelled to northern Iraq, where I researched my book Sweet Tea with Cardamom: a Journey through Iraqi Kurdistan. Again, the bulk of my time was spent drinking tea with women (and men) while listening to their stories. The natural beauty of Kurdistan and the raw warmth of its battered people touched me deeply.
On returning home I took a Masters in Middle East Studies, specializing in history, politics and Arabic language. I made my first visit to Lebanon in 1999. Lebanon had intrigued me for many years, due to its sectarian complexity, its history of recent bloodshed and its significance in the Arab-Israeli conflict. After a couple of weeks walking in the gorges of northern Mount Lebanon, I formulated the questions which would be at the heart of The Curtain Maker of Beirut: Conversations with the Lebanese; but the book’s gestation was to be long and slow.
After completing The Curtain Maker in 2006, I stopped travelling in the Middle East and spent my free time walking in the French Pyrenees. My first novel, Donkey Business: a Pyrenean Adventure of the Heart, was published as an Amazon Kindle in 2013.
Over the last couple of years, the war in Syria and the arrival of large numbers of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Europe have brought my attention back to the Middle East. In the spring of 2016 I revived my Arabic language and spent time as a volunteer in a refugee camp in northern Greece. The experiences I had there inspired me to write Hara Hotel: A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece, in which I interweave a chronicle of everyday life in the camp with the personal story of one refugee, and my attempt to understand the political and historic factors driving the war.
Profile:
Teresa Thornhill
Teresa Thornhill is a linguist, writer and child protection barrister with a special interest in the Middle East. Her previous books include Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey through Iraqi Kurdistan and The Curtain Maker of Beirut: Conversations with the Lebanese.
QUOTED: "What she learned might not feel revelatory to knowledgeable diplomats, but it will certainly enlighten casual followers of that nation's bloodshed."
"a brave, affecting book about a continuing humanitarian crisis."
Print Marked Items
Thornhill, Teresa: HARA HOTEL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Thornhill, Teresa HARA HOTEL Verso (Adult Nonfiction) $24.95 4, 17 ISBN: 978-1-78663-519-8
Thornhill (The Curtain Maker of Beirut: Conversations with the Lebanese, 2011, etc.) offers a personal
account of her time volunteering in Greece as refugees arrived from Syria and other nations beset by strife.
A British child protection barrister by profession, the author, like countless other citizens of the world, had
been moved by the plight of mostly Middle Eastern refugees who seek better lives in Europe but instead end
up herded into camps like cattle. Taking stock of "what skills I could offer," Thornhill thought that her
middling ability to speak Arabic might help. She made arrangements to assist through an organization of
volunteers based in Norway and received an assignment to report to an encampment in northern Greece
dubbed the Hara Hotel. Arriving there in April 2016, the author became acquainted with a Syrian Kurd
refugee named Juwan Azad, who was driven away from a war-torn section of Syria. Azad spoke English
fluently, which gave Thornhill the opportunity to learn from him in-depth. Later, hoping to establish a
permanent life away from the refugee camps, Azad risked his life hiking through Macedonia, Serbia, and
Hungary to cross into Austria. Thornhill learned of Azad's journey, reuniting with him near Vienna to gain
compelling material for this book. In January 2017, the author re-entered Greece for just over a week to find
out what had happened to the refugees who were temporarily stranded at Hara Hotel, among other sites.
Although not every refugee was despairing for the future by early 2017, what the author uncovered contains
far more darkness than light. Thornhill overlays the wrenching refugee sagas with her personal quest to
understand why Syria began its alarming unraveling in 2011. What she learned might not feel revelatory to
knowledgeable diplomats, but it will certainly enlighten casual followers of that nation's bloodshed.
A brave, affecting book about a continuing humanitarian crisis.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Thornhill, Teresa: HARA HOTEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247925/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=423efa58.
Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247925
QUOTED: "Thornhill's warm, descriptive prose [makes] this book hard to put down."
Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey
Through Iraqi Kurdistan
Stephanie Papa
Library Journal.
123.13 (Aug. 1998): p120.
COPYRIGHT 1998 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Thornhill, Teresa. Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey Through Iraqi Kurdistan. New York Univ. Oct.
1998. 256p. ISBN 0-04440-984-2. pap. $18.95. TRAY
As in Making Women Talk (Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, 1992), Thornhill explores the Middle
Eastern world through the eyes of its women. In each chapter, the reader meets a girl or woman who shares
her experience of living under Hussein's regime in Iraqi Kurdistan. Cultural mores, such as the difference
between honor and shame, are explained in tales like that of a 14-year-old girl whose mother had to kill her
in order to save the family's honor after the girl brought shame upon them by being raped in a field by
strangers. The passion and poignancy of these stories, brought to life through Thornhill's warm, descriptive
prose, make this book hard to put down. Recommended for all libraries.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Papa, Stephanie. "Sweet Tea with Cardamom: A Journey Through Iraqi Kurdistan." Library Journal, Aug.
1998, p. 120. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A21071697/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=30db138c. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A21071697