Gail Vida Hamburg
Gail Vida Hamburg is an award-winning American journalist and author. Born in Malaysia to Christian Indian parents, she spent half a life in England before migrating to the U.S., first to New York and then to Chicago, where she developed a career in mass communications, journalism, media relations, museum storytelling, and academia. Hamburg's first novel, "The Edge of the World," about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives -- inspired by Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" -- was released by Mirare Press in 2007. The novel was nominated for the 2008 James Fenimore Cooper Prize by the American Society of Historians. It is a frequent text in university post-colonial studies, war studies, and creative writing programs in the U.S.
Her novel, "Liberty Landing," (Mirare Press, 2018), the first in a trilogy about the American Experiment and Experience was a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.Her film writing includes, The Journey Home, a screenplay about African-Americans in self-imposed exile from America, and a print story adapted for the 2001 film, Mesmerized, starring Mia Farrow and Klaus Marie Brandauer. Her theater work includes the forthcoming Hush, a political rock musical featuring the music of Chicago indie rock band, Clara May; and the development of Hurricane, the Broadway-bound musical, based on the life of African American boxer, Rubin Hurricane Carter, who was wrongly imprisoned for 20 years—for murders he did not commit. Hamburg studied mass communications at college in the UK and holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature from Bennington College, Vermont, USA.
She is on faculty at Roosevelt University, Chicago. Her journalism work has been published in media outlets including Chicago Tribune, Chicago Southtown, Chicago Sun Times; and Huffington Post— where she has written about Palestinians, the Occupation, and the BDS Movement.
