Daughter of the Olive Trees

Sumaya Farhat-Naser was born in 1948 in Birzeit, not far from Jerusalem. She attended the German boarding-school Talitha Kumi in Beit Jala near Bethlehem. She studied biology, geography and educational science in Hamburg and has a doctorate in applied botany. She taught botany and ecology at the Palestinian University of Birzeit from 1982 to 1997, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Münster in 1987. From 1997 to 2001 she was Director of the Palestinian Jerusalem Center for Women, and since 2000 she has been on the board of the Global Fund for Women in San Francisco. She resumed her teaching in Birzeit in 2002. Her biography "Thymian und Steine" ("Thyme and Stones") was published in 1995 by Lenos Verlag. She has received many distinctions for her work for justice and peace: the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights (1995), the Protestant Book Prize of the German Association of Protestant Libraries (1997), the Mount Zion Award for Reconciliation (1997), the Augsburg Peace Prize (2000), the Hermann Kesten Medal of the German P.E.N. Center (2002) and the Bremen Solidarity Prize (2003).