Dunya Mikhail was born in 1965.

Mikhail received a degree in English literature from Baghdad University, and has worked as Literary Editor for The Baghdad Observer.

Facing increasing threats and harassment from the Iraqi authorities for her writings, she fled Iraq in the late 1990s and studied Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. In 2001, she was awarded the UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing.

Her poetry collection The War Works Hard will be published this year in a translation by Elizabeth Winslow, which was supported by a grant from the PEN Translation Fund.