Yasmin Zaher

Yasmin Zaher (b. 1991, Jerusalem, Palestine) is a Palestinian journalist and writer who is based in Paris. She studied at Yale University and the New School in New York. Her debut novel, The Coin (Catapult Books, 2024), was written in English.

The Coin is narrated by a young, unnamed Palestinian woman recently relocated from Palestine to New York, where she works as a teacher at a private middle school while living on a family inheritance she cannot quite access. The novel follows her obsessive self-regulation — of her body, her dress (Stella McCartney, McQueen), her environment — and her entanglement in a scheme involving the resale of Birkin bags, as a way of examining class, statelessness, desire, and the particular psychic condition of a person who exists perpetually between cultures and homes. The novel draws a precise and associative line between the narrator's grandmother's garden in Palestine and the material textures of New York, without resolving the distance between them. The Coin appeared on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2024 list and was described by the Times as an editors' choice. It received the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2025 and was a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize. It has been translated into multiple languages, and more recently in French under the title Dans ma Peau (Éditions de l’Olivier, 2025).