Award-winning former Washington Post columnist Nora Boustany has been appointed as Writer-in-Residence Fellow for the year 2009-2010.

She is the second Writer-in-Residence at IFI, following Anthony Shadid in 2008-2009.
Boustany is currently based in Beirut conducting research at AUB's library for her book – a cultural memoir of the Boustany family meshed into her own narrative as a Lebanese-American who has had a distinguished 32-year career in U.S. media. At AUB, she will participate in selected IFI activities and will give the second annual Issam Fares Institute Writer-in-Residence Lecture at AUB.

Having been raised and schooled in Beirut, Boustany is an AUB alumnus, class of 1975. After completing her graduate studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she returned to Lebanon for a two-year stint at United Press International. In 1979, she began free-lancing for The Washington Post, and in 1988 was hired on as staff exclusively by the Post and worked from Beirut, Amman and Washington D.C., including as diplomatic columnist. She has also contributed to The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and the London Observer.

Boustany is the recipient of the George Polk award (1987), Sigma Delta Chi award in foreign news correspondence (1989), and holds a lifetime achievement award in the category of foreign news reporting from the University of Wisconsin School of Journalism (1992). She is also a three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, for which she was a finalist in 1987 for her coverage of war-scarred Lebanon and the siege of the Palestinian camp of Bourj Al Barajneh.