Layla Hariry is a natural born Saudi Arabian and U.S. citizen. Born in Saudi Arabia to a Meccan father and an American mother, she was raised between Jeddah and California. For most of her childhood she studied exclusively in Arabic attending Dar Al Hanan School in Jeddah, the first girls’ school opened in the modern kingdom by Queen Iffat, the wife of King Faisal. She still vividly remembers her first arranged marriage proposal at the age of fourteen. While it was turned down, several of her closest friends accepted similar offers soon after in their later teens. Instead, she was sent to complete her secondary education at Prior’s Field School in Godalming, Surrey, England.

It is at this private girls’ boarding school founded by Julia Huxley, the mother of celebrated novelist Aldous Huxley, that she first learned to write in English. Though she pushed back her own traditional Arab-Muslim marriage until age twenty, she received her B.A. from the University of Maryland with honors while married and pregnant. It is while she lay in bedrest reading a work by Amy Tan that her lifelong affinity for escape into the novelist universe of fiction sparked into inspired novel writing in earnest. Soon after the birth of her third child she relocated to the Boston area and began creative writing night classes and novel writing workshops at Harvard University.

Despite lengthy custody battles that followed, she managed to live with her three children just outside of Cambridge in Lexington, Massachusetts for over twenty years. In 2010, she received a Harvard University A.L.M. (Master of Liberal Arts) degree focused on Foreign Literature, Language and Culture in Extension Studies. Her master's thesis titled "Home and the Unheimlich in the Arabian Nights: Shahrazad's Curative Themes Linking the Story-cycle to the Frame-story" was published open access via ProQuest UMI, December 2010. It received Honorable Mention for the Dean's Prize for Outstanding A.L.M. Thesis in the Humanities, May 2011. Creative Writing, Comparative Literature, Arabic Language, Literature, and Islamic Studies coursework all helped inform her graduate thesis on the Arabian Nights. She has also studied advanced Modern Standard Arabic at Tufts University.

The author’s academic interests inform her creative writing, which in turn documents the cultural uniqueness of her life experiences with striking, and often unforgettable, polyphonic authenticity transcendently voiced. Or so she hopes.