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Alawiyya Sobh was born in Beirut in the mid 1950s. She studied Arabic and English literature at the Lebanese University in Beirut. She has written on culture for numerous Lebanese papers since the early 1980s. and in 1986 she became chief editor of the most widely-read Arabic women’s magazine, al-Hasna. In 1990 she founded the women’s and family magazine Snob, of which she is still chief editor.

Her début as a novelist came with Naum al-ayyam (Slumbering Days) (1987), which was followed by Dunja (2006). Marjam al-hakaya (Maryam of the Stories) (2002), about the lives of the rural population of South Lebanon, won the Sultan Qabûs Prizem 2006, and has been widely translated. Her most recent novel is Ismuhu al-qharam (2009) (It Calls Itself Passion). Women and their daily realities are at the centre of all her works, which deal with highly-charged socio-political themes and explore such taboos as family structures, sexuality, violence, religiosity, ignorance and superstition.

She lives in Beirut and in 2009 was one of the judges for Beirut39, a project to select and celebrate 39 of the best Arab writers under the age of 39.