Rosa Yasin Hassan is a Syrian novelist and writer. She was born in Damascus in 1974 and studied architecture at university. Upon graduation in 1998, she worked as a journalist, writing for various Syrian and Arabic periodicals. Her first published book was a collection of short stories, published in 2000 under the title A Sky Tainted with Light. She has also written a number of novels, starting with Ebony (2004) which won the Hanna Mina Prize. Her third novel Hurras al-Hawa (Guardians of the Air, 2009) was longlisted for the Arabic Booker Prize. She has been a member of the International Pen Club since 2015 and teaches contemporary Arabic fiction at the University of Hamburg. She has been living in exile in Germany since the end of 2012.