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“Who are some good Palestinian novelists/poets/essayists to read?”

Eighteen literary works translated from the Arabic and forthcoming in English translation between January 1 and June 20, 2018.

“Up there, up above,/ look at her dangling from the sky’s throat./ Look at her fenced with the eyelashes of angels.”

“Only one book by a Yemeni author was submitted this year, and none of the submitted titles were written by authors from Bahrain, Djibouti, Eritrea, Libya, Mauritania, Qatar, or the UAE.”

Yet it was in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Habayeb says, that she found what it meant to be a Palestinian. “I cried because of this discovery.”

“These days, he was spending most of his nights glued to the news bulletins reporting on the erupting revolution in Egypt. There was hardly a morning when he managed to get even one or two hours of sleep.  It was during one of those rare and fitful moments of rest that the phone rang.”

“Poetry, Barghouti pointed out, is his way to explore and discover ideas, but ideas don’t drive the poem.”

This year’s participating writers, according to IPAF organizers, range in age from 26 to 40 and come from six different countries: Oman, Sudan, UAE, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Palestine.

If we allow ourselves to peel off assumptions, biases, “moral lessons,” the sins of ideology, and the lie of the triumph of good and truth over evil and injustice, we will be surprised by the turn of the narrative.