Omar Robert Hamilton is a novelist and filmmaker working between Europe and the Arab world. 

Born in London, he moved to Cairo with the outbreak of revolution in 2011, establishing a media collective with fellow filmmakers to document the uprising from ground level, producing dozens of short documentaries that generated millions of views.

His first novel, The City Always Wins, based on those experiences, was published by Faber & Faber in 2017. It was named a Book of the Year by the Boston Globe and awarded the Society of Authors Betty Trask Award for Best Debut Under 35 and the Prix de Littérature by the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.

He is a co-founder and current Festival Director of the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual festival that takes place in cities across Palestine and a co-editor of the This Is Not a Border: Reflection & Reportage from the Palestine Festival of Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017). 

Most recently, he is the co-editor of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Writings of Alaa Abd el Fattah (Fitzcarraldo, 2021).

Over the last several years he has spent time in various points on the migration path through Europe, writing for Guernica and n+1 and working on an forthcoming novel, due to be published in 2025.

He wrote and directed Though I Know the River is Dry, a short fiction shot in Palestine starring Kais Nashef (Paradise Now) which took the Prix UIP at Rotterdam, Best Short at Abu Dhabi, and was nominated for Best Short at the European Film Awards.