As the author Atef Abu Saif recently reminded us, “people often say that Gaza exports oranges and short stories.” Despite decades of siege and blockade, Gaza has maintained a vibrant literary life and extraordinarily high literacy and educational levels—now threatened because of the destruction of Gaza’s schools. Yet authors have continued to write: urgently, sharply, with clear vision.
In our “where I write now” series, we asked authors to describe their current surroundings; poet-journalist Husam Maarouf writes about what Gazans read during war; and many writers share their poems and reflections. Some of this work has been collected into our “Gaza! Gaza! Gaza!” issue or the free zine And Still We Write. More can be found below.
How Do You Take a Little of Your Life?
"We never knew that things could disappear all at once, and that memory alone could become the only place to come home to." ...
Three New Poems by Taqwa Ahmed Alwawi
"So we open our mouths, / not to scream, / but to release the silence." ...
Two Cat Stories from Gaza
These two stories both come from Palestinian writer and psychologist Dr. Hassan Al-Qatrawi. Hunger’s Siege on Gaza By Dr. Hassan Al-Qatrawi Translated by Munira El Najar Two hours of persistent efforts, all to convince the swarm of cats that had gathered around me—while I was cooking our single meal of the day—that today’s food was not to their liking. I told them, more than once, that it was molokhia. They didn’t believe me. The cats misread the expressions on my face; they kept up a ceaseless chorus of meows. Only one of them seemed to understand what I was saying, and she began meowing at the others, as if explaining that today’s meal was meant for humans. Even then, they ...
On Ansam Abu Sitta’s ‘Bench of the Reserves’
As part of an initiative by Alaan Publishers to publish the works of 12 Gazan writers, Ansam Abu Sitta’s دكة الاحتياط (Bench of the Reserves), published in Arabic in 2026, is a collection of 18 short stories that move between realism and highly condensed symbolism ...
Texts After the Screaming
Nour Balousha wrote these two poems "after I stopped screaming, not because it ended, but because I grew too exhausted to keep screaming." ...
