Her Story
Nadia Bilbassy will publish her Gaza-to-White-House memoir in January 2027
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, who began in journalism at a news agency in Gaza and now runs Al Arabiya's Washington bureau, will publish her memoir with HarperCollins at the start of January 2027. She announced the book, "From Gaza to the White House," in a post written in Arabic to her followers, and said she would give the pre-order date soon.
"This is not a book of history, nor an analysis of current foreign policy," she wrote. "It is a journalistic and human memoir of a journey that stretched across continents, wars and several American administrations."
The journey she describes opens in Gaza, at her first steps in the profession with Agence France-Presse. It runs on through Southeast Asia and then through long years in Africa as a war correspondent — southern Sudan, the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Rwanda and the tragedies of the genocide, South Africa and a meeting with Nelson Mandela — and through the war in Iraq.
The last four chapters are set in the White House, where she has covered one American administration after another, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. She covers it still.
The road that starts in Gaza#
Arabic profiles of her career date her start to 1987, filing for Agence France-Presse, and record a master's in journalism from City, University of London. In an interview with Al Arabiya's own magazine she counted more than thirty years in the profession, ten of them in Africa as a war correspondent.
She moved to Washington with Al Arabiya after covering the beginning of the American invasion of Iraq, she told the magazine, and has lived in the city for about two decades. A 2021 profile by the Dubai channel Akhbar Al Aan carried the name her colleagues gave her along the way: the lady of the White House.
A career does not begin at the top of the ladder. It begins with the first step, with real work, in the field.
Nadia Bilbassy, announcing her memoir
That line is the one she offers to readers who are nowhere near a bureau chief's desk. It begins, she wrote, in the hardest places and the ones furthest from the lights, and it climbs by patience, persistence, learning, falling and standing up again.
A woman and a mother, behind the headlines#
"From Gaza to the White House" is not only a reporter's story moving from battlefields to the corridors of the White House, she wrote. "It is also the story of a woman and a mother — of the private life behind the headlines, of loss and grief and rising and self-fulfilment, and of trying to build a life and a family in a world that never stops changing."
She tells in it how she carried two small boys across four continents, and how she tried, in the middle of the pressures and the tragedies she was covering, to raise them into "two young men who are successful, strong, loving and able to face life."
She hopes above all, she wrote, that the story reaches the women and the young women setting out on their road today.
The Gaza the book opens in#
The Gaza where the journey begins is not the Gaza of now. Bilbassy has said in televised remarks that twelve members of her family were killed in the war and that her house in the city was destroyed.
She has gone on putting questions to American officials about that same war from the White House briefing room, an assignment few of her colleagues there share and none of them share in the same way.
"I hope you find in its pages something that holds you, or inspires you, or gives you the courage to keep going on your own journey," she wrote. The book arrives at the beginning of January 2027, and she promised her readers the pre-order date shortly.
