A novel

A Stranger
in Baghdad

About Elizabeth Loudon

I grew up in Oxfordshire, then spent a year travelling in Iraq and Lebanon before studying English at Cambridge, after which I moved to the US. I earned an MFA in Fiction at the University of Massachusetts and stayed in New England for 25 years, teaching English and working as a fundraiser and charity development consultant.

Along the way I published fiction and memoir in the Denver Quarterly, INTRO, North American Review, and the Gettysburg Review, and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Fiction. A Stranger in Baghdad is my debut novel, and a tribute to the people I met long ago in Baghdad. It was longlisted for the Bridport Novel Award and won the Stroud Book Festival Fiction Award.

I now live in Gloucestershire and am working on a second novel and writing poetry, some of which you can read on this website.

A Stranger in Baghdad book cover
LONGLISTED FOR THE BRIDPORT NOVEL AWARD

About A Stranger In Baghdad

Summoning up the vanished world of mid-twentieth-century Baghdad, Elizabeth Loudon's richly evocative story of one family calls into question British attitudes and policies in Iraq and offers up a penetrating reflection on cross-cultural marriage and the lives of women caught between different worlds.

Readers and reviewers alike are praising A Stranger In Baghdad for its "stunning acumen and imagination" (The New Arab). Noshin Bokth describes it as "a delicately crafted saga of subterfuge, family, identity, and the turbulent convergence of disparate cultures". In the Washington Independent Review of Books, reviewer AA Bastian admires how the book "majestically dances you into the thick of it all, down to the 'long black fringes' of Diane’s shawl and the essence of old Baghdad embodied in their first home."

For full reviews, see:

Reviews

Order now

A Stranger in Baghdad: A Novel is available for order now in hardcover, paperback and eBook formats.

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop.org

indigo