Danny Ramadan
2024-25 Canadian Writer-in-Residence
Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-Canadian author and LGBTQ-refugees advocate
His memoir, Crooked Teeth, came out in May 2024 to raving reviews. His latest novel, The Foghorn Echoes won the Lambda Award for Gay Fiction, and was nominated for the BC & Yukon Book awards, and the City of Vancouver Book Award. The Clothesline Swing won the Independent Publisher Book Award, long-listed for Canada Reads, and is translated to multiple languages. His award-winning children’s books The Salma Series received the Nautilus Book Award, The Publishing Triangle Award and the Middle East Book Award, amongst dozens of other nominations and honours.
Since his arrival to Canada, Ramadan has raised over $300,000 for LGBTQ+ identifying refugees ensuring safe passage to more than two dozen queer and trans refugees. Ramadan graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC, and received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Adler University.
He lives in Vancouver with his husband and two dogs. When he is not writing, he is probably playing video games.
Praise for Crooked Teeth
“Once I began reading, I couldn’t stop until the final page. Countless others will be thankful for this raw, idiosyncratic, utterly compelling account of Danny’s long journey home.”
—Lawrence Hill, author of The Illegal
Praise for The Foghorn Echoes
“Danny Ramadan is a gifted, sensitive excavator of the things that break people and put them back together, the past as weight and lightness. In this novel he has created a world of immense sensory and emotional precision, at once true in its living details and yet electric with the presence of ghosts.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
Danny's recent books
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir. Penguin Random House, 2024.
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.”
So begins this electrifying personal account from Danny Ramadan, a celebrated novelist who has long enjoyed the shield his fiction provides. Now, to tell the story of his life, he must revisit dark corners of his past he’d rather forget and unearth memories of a city he can no longer return to.
The Foghorn Echoes. Penguin Random House, 2024
The Foghorn Echoes
- Winner of the Lambda Literary Awards 2023 - Gay Fiction.
- Shortlisted for the BC and Yukon Book Prizes 2023 - The Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.
- Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Award 2023.
A deeply moving novel about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.
Syria, 2003. A blooming romance leads to a tragic accident when Hussam’s father catches him acting on his feelings for his best friend, Wassim. In an instant, the course of their lives is changed forever.
The Clothesline Swing. Harbour Publishing, 2017
The Clothesline Swing
- Winner of the 2018 Fred Kerner Book Award, presented by the Canadian Authors Association.
- Won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction
- Longlisted for CBC’s Canada Reads 2018.
The Clothesline Swing is a journey through the troublesome aftermath of the Arab Spring. A former Syrian refugee himself, Ramadan unveils an enthralling tale of courage that weaves through the mountains of Syria, the valleys of Lebanon, the encircling seas of Turkey, the heat of Egypt and finally, the hope of a new home in Canada.