Her Name Was Clara

Torn between doubt and certainty, confident in both letter and dream, she soars through the realms of poetry and literature with wings made of paper.

Clara is the embodiment of feminine contradictions, inked with imagination. She writes herself through others and writes others through herself.

She seeks inner peace sometimes by imposing a truce between the heart and the mind, but more often by breaking it. For the heart recognizes neither truces nor laws.

A woman in her thirties who feels more than she thinks, so she leads her life to rush and take risks in mazes of adventure.

Strives to elevate emotion to the level of reason in pursuit of perfection.

Her Name Was Clara is a novel woven from obsessions about love, dancing, dreaming, and madness.

Zina Tawfiq Shams is of Syrian nationality, was born in Damascus in 1986, and has lived in the United Arab Emirates since 1996.

She studied at the American University of Sharjah - Department of Media - and then obtained a master’s degree in translation and interpretation with honors in 2015 from the American University of Sharjah.

The writer has cultural, literary and artistic interests, including: playing the violin and dancing ballet, in addition to reading and writing.

She started writing at the age of eighteen, and as the years passed and gained some life experience, she realized that writing was not a profession, but rather a faculty that ran through her soul, so this novel was begun.