Strangers

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a writer and translator based in the UK. Her most recent book is Erasing Palestine (Verso, 2023). Her translations from Persian with Kayvan Tahmasebian have received PEN Presents and PEN Translates awards from English PEN. She is currently working on a book entitled Doves Born from Light: Writers' Homes and Readers' Lives and an oral history of the Gaza Genocide with the Lighthouse Collective. She writes and edits The Textual Materialist newsletter and is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

"Throughout her vast oeuvre, Rebecca Ruth Gould writes with poetic language. Her boundaries are liquid and wholly interwoven. Her stories pulse with reflection, often unfolding as meta-narratives. Her writing abounds in historical texture, as though she were offering us a tale rather than a treatise." -Saleh Razzouk, Syrian writer and translator of Strangers into Arabic

"Gould makes no attempt to resolve the issues that divide and unite people or the wider religious and political dilemmas that divide the world. She leaves the reader with no happy ending for either subject. There is, however, a satisfying sense of a story, romance, allegory, or both, well told by a highly skilled and insightful storyteller." -Wendy Klein, author of Mood Indigo (2016).

"Rebecca Ruth Gould demonstrates how love--self-possessed and stubborn--transcends the bounds of language, culture, and state repression." -David Cooke, editor, The High Window

"The language employed [by Gould] is the language of longing. I was touched by how much the narrator sees as well as by how much is held back." -Sabyasachi (Sachi) Nag, author of Bloodlines (2009) and Could You Please, Please Stop Singing? (2016)