With Ibtisam Azem at the Torino Book Fair

With Ibtisam Azem at the Torino Book Fair

By Olivia Snaije

Ibtisam Azem and Adania Shibli were both at Italy’s largest public-facing book fair in Turin last month. Both authors have experienced renewed interest in their work—in Azem’s case, she was invited back to tour Italy and talk about her novel, The Book of Disappearance (il libro della scomparsa), which was translated by Barbara Teresi and published in Italian in 2021. Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (un dettaglio minore), translated by Monica Ruocco, was also published in 2021, while her earlier novella Touch (Sensi) was also translated by Ruocco and published early this year. (Touch was translated into English by Paula Haydar in 2010).

In Italy, Azem is published in a series curated by journalist and writer Paola Caridi  for the Turin-based publisher hopefulmonster, which also publishes Najwan Darwish, Alaa Abd el-Fattah, and Sinan Antoon. The Book of Disappearance (Dar al-Jamal, 2014) translated into English by Sinan Antoon, has had several lives, Azem said. When it was first published in the US by Syracuse University Press in 2019 it did well in small circles, she says, and was chosen as book of the year in 2020 by Librarians for Palestine. After meeting Preti Taneja, a contributing editor at And Other Stories at the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2023, And Other Stories published the book in the UK. This edition was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025, giving the book another life and the reason, she assumes, for its newfound interest in other countries. The ongoing genocide, she says, is also bringing attention to Palestinian culture. So far, Azem’s novel has been translated or is in the process of being translated into German, Dutch, Polish, Persian, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.

Twenty months into Israel’s devastating genocidal offensive in Gaza and the continuing and increasingly violent settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank, Azem’s book, which imagines the sudden and collective disappearance of Palestinians living in the State of Israel, has never seemed so chillingly palpable. A recent poll of Israelis by Haaretz found that 82 percent “expressed support for the forced expulsion of residents of the Gaza Strip, and 56 percent supported the forced expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel.”

Azem, who lives in New York and is a full-time correspondent at the UN for al-Araby al-Jadeed, has largely not focused on her fiction. She was able to finish editing a collection of short stories, originally due in October 2023, when there was a brief lull in the bombing last January. She changed two stories to reflect what was happening in Gaza. “For me, fiction can sometimes begin when I hear one sentence which is the starting point for my story,” she said.

One such starting point was when Azem heard a mother on a short video mourning her child who had been killed. She said, “he died hungry.”

Another story was sparked by an image she saw of an oversized teddy bear sitting in the rubble. Yet ser short-story collection, which will be out this summer with Takween, is not just about Palestine; it is also about social struggles and women’s issues in other countries, as she believes these issues are all connected.

She is currently at work on a new novel, although it’s not an easy process, she says, describing how she wakes up at 5 am and works until 8 am, after which she goes to her day job, where she is submerged by the news cycle. The novel is framed around a family, and it focuses on the internal violence within Palestinian society inside Israel. She says that she wants to connect the dots between society and politics. To that end, Azem has conducted 20 hours of interviews with Palestinians and published part of her research in a longform article in the Italian edition of The Passenger magazine’s issue on Palestine, released in September 2023. Unfortunately, the English edition—which usually follows each Italian edition—was cancelled. In the article, she cites two well-documented studies by Palestinian NGOs on the subject: Adalah and Baladna.

Azem has worked in radio, television, and print journalism. She worked in television until 2014, a medium that helped her condense her writing. Later, when she began working in print journalism, she found she needed to be careful not to mix journalistic writing with her fiction.

“I have two separate spaces in my head as well as separate physical spaces where I do my writing,” Azem says. She walks from the office to her home each day, which allows her to leave her day job behind and think about her fiction. She writes her fiction from home or in cafés, and adds that The Book of Disappearance was written in several different cafés.

“When I write fiction I’m more playful, I go back to being a child, where there are no borders or limits. I try not to think of my readers. Despite the difficult subjects, there is joy.”

She travels regularly to the village of Tayibe where her parents live, both of whom were displaced during the Nakba. Just after Turin, she was off first to Jordan for a literary event, then back to Tayibe, where for the first time since she began writing, a local NGO had invited her to discuss her forthcoming book of short stories.

Olivia Snaije (oliviasnaije.com) is a journalist and editor based in Paris. She translated Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon (Jonathan Cape), and has written several books on Paris published by Dorling Kindersley and Flammarion. Editions Textuel (Paris) and Saqi Books (London) published Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, which she co-edited with Mitch Albert.