Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature
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Writers from Alice Walker to Michael Ondaatje to Claire Messud share their thoughts on one of the most vital gatherings of writers and readers in the world.
The Palestine Festival of Literature was established in 2008 by authors Ahdaf Soueif, Brigid Keenan, Victoria Brittain and Omar Robert Hamilton. Bringing writers to Palestine from all corners of the globe, it aimed to break the cultural siege imposed by the Israeli military occupation, to strengthen artistic links with the rest of the world, and to reaffirm, in the words of Edward Said, "the power of culture over the culture of power."
This Is Not a Border is a collection of essays, poems, and sketches from some of the world's most distinguished artists, responding to their experiences at this unique festival. Both heartbreaking and hopeful, their gathered work is a testament to the power of literature to promote solidarity and hope in the most desperate of situations.
Contributing authors include J. M. Coetzee, China Miéville, Alice Walker, Geoff Dyer, Claire Messud, Henning Mankell, Michael Ondaatje, Kamila Shamsie, Michael Palin, Deborah Moggach, Mohammed Hanif, Gillian Slovo, Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Ahdaf Soueif, Jeremy Harding, Brigid Keenan, Rachel Holmes, Suad Amiry, Gary Younge, Jamal Mahjoub, Molly Crabapple, Najwan Darwish, Nathalie Handal, Omar Robert Hamilton, Pankaj Mishra, Raja Shehadeh, Selma Dabbagh, William Sutcliffe, Atef Abu Saif, Yasmin El-Rifae, Sabrina Mahfouz, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Mercedes Kemp, Ru Freeman.
William Sutcliffe is the author of twelve novels, including the international bestseller Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He has written for adults, young adults and children, and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. His 2008 novel Whatever Makes You Happy is now a Netflix Original film starring Patricia Arquette, Felicity Huffman and Angela Bassett. It was released in August 2019 under the title Otherhood.
His latest novel, The Gifted, The Talented and Me, was described by The Times as 'dangerously funny' and by the Guardian as 'refreshingly hilarious'.
China Mi�ville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City & The City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C Clarke Awards; his non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London's Overthrow, and Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. He has a PhD in International Relations from the LSE. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, The Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta. He is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage. He has been a fellow of the McDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, and the Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
JEREMY HARDING is a Contributing Editor at the London Review of Books. His books include Border Vigils; Small Wars, Small Mercies; and Mother Country.
Henning Mankell (1948-2015) was an internationally bestselling author who received numerous awards, including the Crime Writers' Association's Macallan Gold Dagger and the German Tolerance Prize. His Kurt Wallander mysteries are global bestsellers and have been adapted into the PBS Masterpiece Mystery! series Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh. The New Press has published English translations of nine of his Kurt Wallander mysteries--Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, Sidetracked, The Fifth Woman, One Step Behind, Firewall, The Man Who Smiled, and The Pyramid--and Before the Frost: A Linda Wallander Mystery; the novels The Return of the Dancing Master, Chronicler of the Winds, Depths, Kennedy's Brain, The Eye of the Leopard, Italian Shoes, Daniel, and The Shadow Girls; and the nonfiction I Die, But My Memory Lives On: The World AIDS Crisis and the Memory Book Project. Born in Stockholm, Mankell grew up in the Swedish village of Sveg. He divided his time between Sweden and Maputo, Mozambique, where he was a director at Teatro Avenida.
Linda Spalding is the author of the bestselling The Follow. She is editor of Brick magazine and lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Ondaatje.
ADAM FOULDS was born in 1974, took a Creative Writing M.A. at the University of East Anglia, and now lives in South London. Foulds is the recipient of the 2008 Costa Poetry Award, for his book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, as well as the 2008 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award, The Southbank Show Award for Literature and a 2007 Betty Trask Award. His novel The Quickening Maze was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. And it was announced at the 2013 London Book Fair that he is included on Granta's annual list of Best Young British Novelists, alongside Zadie Smith, Steven Hall, Tahmima Anam and Ross Raisin.
Gillian Slovo, author of the novel Red Dust, now a feature film, and co-author of the play Guant�namo, as well as a memoir and nine other novels, lives in London.
Mahmoud Darwish (1941 - 2008) was the author of over thirty books of poems, including Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (California, 1995), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), and Psalms (1994). He received the 2001 Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation.
Munir Akash is a founding editor of Jusoor, The Arab American Journal of Cultural Exchange, and coeditor of The Adam of Two Edens (2001) and Post Gibran: Anthropology of New Arab American Writing (2000). Carolyn Forché is Professor of English at George Mason University and author of The Angel of History (1994). Sinan Antoon is coeditor of Arab Studies Journal. Amira El-Zein is the author of Bedouin of Hell (1992) and The Book of Palm Trees (1973).
Fady Joudah is a prize-winning poet, translator, and physician. He is the author of The Earth in the Attic (2008) and Alight (2013), and the translator of two volumes of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry, The Butterfly’s Burden (2007) and If I Were Another (2009).
Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, editor, and co-producer of the Palestine Festival of Literature. She works with Cairo's independent Mada Masr newspaper, and her writing has also appeared in LitHub, The Nation, and Lux magazine, among other places. This is her first book.
susan abulhawa is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. She was born to refugees of the Six-Day War of 1967, when her family's land was seized and Israel captured what remained of Palestine. Her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin, translated into thirty languages, has sold over a million copies worldwide and is considered a classic in Palestinian literature. Her other works include The Blue Between Sky and Water and Against the Loveless World, an Aspen Words Literary Prize and Atheneum Prize finalist and winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Palestine Book Award, along with, most recently, the short story collection she edited of writers from Gaza, Every Moment is a Life. abulhawa is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a children's organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children.
Sabrina Mahfouz has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King's Alumni Arts & Culture Award. She has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry, a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights and a Fringe First Award for her play Chef. Her play With a Little Bit of Luck won the 2019 Best Drama Production at the BBC Radio & Music Awards. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa won a 2018 Off West End Award.
Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year and the forthcoming Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen. She's an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant and is currently writing a biopic of the rapper and producer Wiley, for Pulse Films.
Pankaj Mishra, journalist and co-founder of FactorDaily, has spent over two decades telling stories that create deep, personal connections. His Outliers podcast began in sound and traveled into words, shaping his book Against the Grain.
Ghada Karmi�was born in Jerusalem and trained as a doctor of medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Her previous books include�Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process?, The Palestinian Exodus 1948-1998�(with Eugene Cotran),�Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine,�and the best-selling�In Search of Fatima. She writes frequently for theGuardian�and the�Nation.
Victoria Brittain, currently a Research Associate at the London School of Economics, has lives and worked as a journalist in Washington, Saigon, Algiers, Nairobi, and London. She worked at 'The Guardian' for 20 years, most recently as Associate Foreign Editor.
Rachel Holmes is the author of four biographies; The Secret Life of James Barry, The Hottentot Venus, Eleanor Marx: A Life and Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel. All are published by Bloomsbury. She has also edited collections of political writing, published as a journalist and worked as an academic, activist and literary programmer. Between Two Fires is her second work for the stage. She co-commissioned Sixty Six Books: 21st Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible (Oberon, 2011), with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon.
Jamal Mahjoub was born in London and spent his formative years in Khartoum, Sudan. Since then he has settled in a number of cities, including London, Aarhus, Barcelona and, more recently, Amsterdam.
The author of seven novels, his work, fiction and non-fiction, has been critically acclaimed and widely translated. He has published six crime novels featuring private detective Makana, using the pen name Parker Bilal.
jamalmahjoub.com
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