“There is no meta-message for Ramallah,” a political science lecturer friend says to me as we drive past the Ramallah Museum, which according to him leaves a lot to be desired. “We were discussing this in class and could not come up with a meta-message for this place. Not in art, or history-“”Could it be the non-violent resistant movements of the first Intifada?” I suggest helpfully.

“What are you talking about?”

His wife says, “Me. I am the meta-message of Ramallah.”

The more I get to understand about this businesswoman, lecturer and mother of four, who from her garden can see the red lights of new settler outposts blinking on the hillside, the more I realize that she isn’t joking.

The Qattan Foundation in Ramallah is a majestic early 20^th century stone house with arched windows and a terrace, where John Berger, a former Qattan Guest House Resident, debated long into the night with the Foundation staff under hanging grapes parceled up in papery plastic bags. The offices are empty for much of the time I am there; I arrive before the Eid holiday at the end of Ramadan. Fig thieves drive up one day in a car. “Is everyone away?” they ask as I work at the outside table. “Yes everyone,” I reply to their beaming faces. They set about picking figs and bagging them up before a young man comes towards me offering a small plate of fruits with a gallantry lost many years ago in the West.

The Guest House, behind the Qattan offices, is structured like a CIA safe house, a bare concrete structure with a heavy metal door. Behind it a mobile mast straddles the hill. To the right a 10-storey building is being constructed by two men in T-shirts who, with an air of vagueness, occasionally hang on ropes and tap at it with picks. It is rumoured to belong to Mohammed Dahlan, the controversial Palestinian Authority figure (henchman, spy, murderer of Arafat, himself a victim of conspiracy?). Behind this maybe-one day-it’ll-be-a hotel looming concrete cavity is the locked Christian cemetery where the murdered American archaeologist Albert Glock (central character of Edward Fox’s Brilliant Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr. Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land) is buried. A lone mongrelly dog pads up to my door, keen on taking a place on the rug. I try to feed it lasagna from a doggy bag, sure that its doting behavior is driven by its stomach, but it couldn’t care less. The day before I leave, a dignified film-maker, with the dapper air of the Rive Gauche, saunters up the path with a see-through plastic bag of freshly chopped meat, and I understand the dog’s contempt for my offerings. A lizard pokes its head through the hole for the television aerials in to my room most evenings. One writer or artist can occupy the Guest House at a time, for a period of up to three months. Before me was a Brazilian filmmaker who was loved by the unnamed, well-fed dog. The messages in the guestbook rage and lament, and document inspiration from Ramallah. I mull over what my entry will be, am determined not to write a word until just before the end of my two-week stay, waiting for the meta-message to strike me like a holy prophecy. This turns out to be the wrong approach, as my goal of writing three scenes a day, seeing as much as I can (including stand-up comedy by a Palestinian American comedienne with cerebral palsy, Maysoon Ziadeh, who sits down), together with the chaos and agony of my friends’ lives, ends up taking over my life, and my scrawl of “Taxi’s here, must go–” ends up being the testimony I leave the Guest House with, next to the calligraphy and care of Berger et al.

Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, responsible for the Literature Programme at the Qattan Foundation, is one of the few people with something good to say about the peace deals of the 1990s and the impact they have had on Palestinian society. He agrees with me that the upside of Oslo is that there seems to be a new era of iconoclastic writing. Writers feel freer to write about the faults in their society and their personal experiences, rather than being boxed in by the Palestinian national narrative. “Everything changed after Oslo,” Abu Hashhash says. “It both questioned the way that people dealt with themes and political issues as well as making writers more stylistically experimental.” This year 26 novels were submitted for the annual Qattan award, more than double the previous year.

I am here to write a play commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and to record,with a Marantz recorder, which I have been trained to use by my producer in London as though I am assembling a bomb, background noises or ‘Atmos.’ I have a list of atmospheric sounds that I need to collect to fit the scenes of my play.

My play follows the journey of a woman, Rasha, who comes from an old Christian Jerusalemite family, travelling back to the Old City on her one-day permit. During that journey she discovers realities about the father she adored which she would rather not know. My list of required ‘Atmos’ includes the following: (1) EXT. Quiet Jerusalem street. Close to front door. 5’00” time: 1800 (2) EXT. Communal taxi, 1 rear door closing, stationary (3) INT. Humble family home living room. 5’00” very early morning.

I learn to interpret the world through sound. I jump at a horse-drawn cart jangling down the street and put on my headphones, fiddling with sound levels; I appreciate more the lyricism here of the adaan call to prayer (none of the screaming vitriol of some of the mosques I have heard in Pakistan, Egypt and the Gulf) as well as the loudest wedding music ever. At 6 am one morning, I take my character’s journey from the village of Eizariya to Jerusalem. I had lived there when I was 22, travelling into Jerusalem each day (it took 15 minutes then, it takes over an hour now) to write pithy paragraphs on shootings for the human rights organisation where I once worked. The village of Eizariya is now a town; I can’t see the bare rooms where I lived; a town divided by the Wall which is scrawled with graffiti and blotted with the marks left when someone tried to burn an absolutely non-flammable object. The Wall is a horror that disorientates as much as it divides. In East Jerusalem the shabab youth shoot toy bullets and throw silly stones at the car my UN friend drives me around in, as they think we are from the other side. An Israeli flag the size of a billboard flutters over a house bought from a Palestinian, found shot dead days later in Jericho. There are houses taken over by settlers everywhere in East Jerusalem. Fake shrines and false archaeology. It’s an efficient, aggressive and disciplined takeover; a systematic making-ugly of all that is Palestinian.

I carry my Marantz recorder hesitantly as there are soldiers, and then I start asking shopkeepers if I can record here, there, on the street, in the church, by the underwear shop, in the garden, and by the end I am marching through the Old City from the Jewish quarter to Damascus Gate with the orange-headed mike swaddled like a baby in my arms, picking up the sounds of rice falling against brass dishes, Chinese toy dogs barking, soldiers’ radios, touts shouting about the Stations of Christ and souvenirs, the woeful singing of Filipino pilgrims, and the scratch and start of amplifiers calling the faithful to prayer against the bells of others.

Once, I am dropped at Kalandia after going for dinner in Jerusalem. It’s late. 11 pm and for some reason they have closed the checkpoint. The Israeli soldiers have the jitters (“They are always nervous,” my aunt says later). The temperature drops at night. We should all stand here, no there. Stand, wait. They call someone out of the queue randomly. You, you, man come here, I need to check your papers. I am nervous for the man pulled out and I have no vested interest. I am glad it is not me, but I am nothing but privilege in this gathering as I have a maroon document in my bag. You, you, go back. In the cars, women dressed and made-up for parties sit impatiently, children squirm in their seats, horns start beeping. There is no reason for the closure, but everyone talks as though talking enough, asking enough, showing resilience, disdain, contempt will reduce it, make us rise above it. The wall slides open and Israeli soldiers, machismo bristling out of their necks, rev their engine as their jeep drives comfortably through the man-made gateway to the other side.

About the author

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website. Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

The post Notes from a Safe House in Area A appeared first on English PEN.

The looking back and summing up season is upon us, and I’d like briefly to look at the PEN Atlas as it nears the end of its first year of life. Our main aim has been to look at new voices and literature all over the world and to introduce them to an audience in the UK by commissioning new and original blogs written by writers, critics and translators.

English PEN itself has a translation programme helping both the promotion and translation of international literature via two Writers in Translation Awards – PEN Translates! and PEN Promotes! – and some of the books featured in the Atlas come to us through these grant schemes.

In many of our 2012 blogs we looked at how writers dealt with political problems and conflicts in their countries, in this way supporting the core PEN activity of defending and promoting the freedom to write and the freedom to read. We will be returning to many of these countries again next year, as unfortunately most of the conflicts covered by the Atlas are still underway. These continue to make it difficult for writers to express themselves freely as well as endangering their lives. Samar Yazbek wrote to us from Syria about the perils of reporting from a war zone and in January we will have another Syrian, Nihad Sirees, one of the winners of a 2013 English PEN Writers in Translation Award, writing about Aleppo and its incomprehensible destruction. And later in the year we will be covering another of the PEN Award Winners: Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, which compiles some of the most exciting new writing borne out of the Arab Spring.

Hassan Blasim discussed the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the role literature plays in how society deals with tragic events. The Devil’s Workshop by Jachym Topol, again one of the winners of a Writers in Translation Award, deals with the more distant past of concentration camps in Belarus. We will be talking to Jachym Topol later this year.

Selma Dabbagh wrote very movingly from the Palestinian Literary Festival about the fragile situation in Gaza. Alas, the crisis there has deepened and we will return to the festival next year to look at the response of writers to the events there. Lydia Cacho’s reporting from Mexico has won awards and accolades. For us, she wrote about taking risks and being afraid. She is still reporting and still in danger.

We hope that as the reviewing space in print media shrinks, PEN Atlas, like some other literary websites, is filling that gap and providing more outlets for literary criticism and debate.

We also have been following trends and reported on developments in international publishing by featuring specialists’ opinions. We have looked out for new writers who might be interesting for a British audience and for publishers here. In this way, we have introduced Alisa Ganieva from Dagestan, Yuri Herrera from Mexico and Park Wan-Suh from South Korea among others.

PEN Atlas dispatches in 2012 took us all over the world, from Mexico and China to Greece, the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia. And as we continue to explore the world’s literature in the New Year, we hope to bring you closer to interesting places and introduce you to new writers.

And if you still have any presents to buy, you might find inspiration here in our list of books recommended by publishers, writers and festival organisers. And for literary inspiration look at one of our most moving stories this year – Santiago Gamboa’s ‘Of Poets and Aviators’.

In the meantime, happy festive reading and all the very best in the New Year!

Tasja Dorkofikis,

Editor, PEN Atlas

The post PEN Atlas – One Year On appeared first on English PEN.

I recently came across the term PEP, an acronym used in the US for Progressive Except Palestine, to describe those individuals who advocate adherence to human rights principles and will espouse all sorts of liberal, possibly even radical views of world politics supporting freedom of expression, but who hit a blind spot when it comes to the Palestinians. This is all too often due to the lazy conflation of  ‘anti-Semitism’ with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israeli policies.

My novel, Out of It, was mainly set in Gaza and written from afar. I did not know how it would feel to go back to a place that I had been living in as a fictional world for such a long time. I only knew it fleetingly from a couple of visits that I had made in the nineties when the place was going through a building boom of institutions and authorities. Our enthusiasm for the Oslo peace accords was muted. We felt a keen sense of humiliation in the compromises agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the professional incompetence that they were prone to display. But no one anticipated the horrors that were to come in the form of F16s raids on schools, UN institutions and homes, together with the use of white phosphorous and the seeping, debasing nature of the blockade.

I have been mildly chastised by pro-Palestinian reviewers for ‘unflinchingly’ portraying the divisions within Palestinian society in my novel. I became more defensive over this point, than over the criticisms of it being anti-Israeli which were knee jerk in their nature and predictable in their existence. Learning how serious the divisions between factions has become during my visit to Gaza this time, confirmed my view that I had done the right thing by addressing them in Out of It. I do not believe that a writer should avoid writing about the failures that they would rather not acknowledge. The writer of fiction is not the PR agent for any government, nor even for any group of people. They should be free, within the bounds of responsibility, to write what they observe, feel and consider important. It is my view that when writing about a societal conflict which a writer of fiction has the power to create, a writer presents new representations of old realities and explains worlds seen frequently in a sensationalist way by the media, but they should not be tied down to partisan positions, nor be expected to uphold them unquestioningly.

Going back to literature for answers, there is a line by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani where he says that no matter what our failures are, these do not excuse the conduct of our oppressor. This needs to be recognized as well. The old adage that two wrongs do not make a right is too often forgotten.

Our Festival ends in Cairo, addressing a packed audience in a downtown theatre, where the walls of surrounding buildings are stenciled and spray-painted with revolutionary graffiti.

I fly back to London, calculating that I have been in seven countries in two months, desperate to be back home after two weeks away from my children. My ex-husband has been staying with them in my flat. I go out the night after coming home, driving in a car with a full tank of fuel. A CD given to me by a Californian friend, ‘Happy New Year Selma, Funk Soul Divas,’ scribbled on it is on. It is a summery evening and the city glitters, almost burns as the lights come on. I discuss topics with my friends from the personal to the political in an unlimited, indiscreet way. The question, What does it feel like to be free? What does freedom feel like? whispers in my ear and I vow to find ways, to build on ways of sharing my relative wealth of freedom with those that I left behind, and I am grateful to PalFest for providing me with some means of being able to do so.

About the Author

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

Additional Information

Ghassan Kanafani, (1936-1972) the famous Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, whose writings were deeply rooted in Arab Palestinian culture and inspired a whole generation during and after his lifetime.

The post Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 3 appeared first on English PEN.

Light now also comes in the form of enemy surveillance. Ominous floodlights, spaced apart in the sea, shine inland enforcing the unilaterally imposed Israeli three-mile limit for fishermen at sea. At night, in Gaza city, men smoke shishas in cafes lit by candles stuck on tiled surfaces; small stacks of coals glow upon inhalation.

Generators on pavements spread fumes into areas where people used to stroll in the evenings. Occasionally, these generators blow up. Badly made, ineptly used, in a country of chain smokers, they are hazardous. Because of the dangers, the mother of one Al Aqsa student refuses to have one in their apartment, ‘When the electricity is on, I use the internet, but I read books by candlelight,’ she says. Donkeys, camels, bicycles and horses are on the rise. Gaza, as the character Khalil says in Out of It, is being bombed back into the Middle Ages.

On the first night in my hotel room, where a ghoul, in the guise of urine-saturated bedding, crouches shapeless in the cupboard (I lock him in), the power cuts out. Complete blackness: I can’t even see the edge of the bath. I think I hear the roar of a fighter plane above me.  Possibly it is a jet breaking the sound barrier, but that type of blackout distorts noise. My imagination, ever prone to swell uncontrollably with visions of possibilities, imagines a bombing. I remember the line from the Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, ‘We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal-dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes,’ and I, quite simply, don’t want to be there. I have the vulgar luxury of options and I feel self-conscious of this wealth in Gaza. It is rare to find someone there who has anything close to alternatives.

‘We are in a big prison. You know, sijun, prison. We. Are. In. A. Big. Prison.’ Everyone says this: students, boys at the Rafah crossing trying to get to Turkey for a couple of days, a short-story writer with a teething baby. ‘You don’t know how unusual that music concert at the Shawwa Centre was,’ they say, ‘Boys sitting next to girls on the floor, standing, dancing. That never happens. What does it feel like to be free?’ ask the students. ‘What’s it like?’

One of the most talented (and modest) writers on the PalFest delegation, Tarik Hamdan, (‘He looks like the young Jean Genet,’ the novelist Youssef Rakha observes to me) reads poetry to a University class by the light of his mobile phone. At night, the city without electricity is a ghost town. During the day, its underutilized spaces – hotel lobbies, restaurants, cafes, shops – are populated by solitary men who appear to have been abandoned. There is a sense of unanticipated loss in these attendant figures, as though they have all been jilted and still reel internally with their heartache.

People have taken to cheering as the lights go out, as if it’s a big joke, ‘Ha ha! It’s done it again!’      This happens on Thursday night when we pile upstairs into the fifth floor of our hotel after plain-clothes security from Hamas close down our closing ceremony. This is denied by Hamas Government officials later and multiple apologies are given both that night and the next morning. ‘Bullshit’, says a Palestinian writer, ‘That’s bullshit’. Whoever was behind the decision, someone obviously wanted a shot fired across our bow.

We continue the curtailed event on the top floor of the hotel. ‘Let’s be constructive,’ says one young woman from Diwan Ghazza who obviously finds life too short to watch dust settle. ‘How do you recommend we set up this competition for bloggers?’ She asks this as we all still trying to find out what happened to the tiny girl whose phone was snatched, abruptly, vindictively, from her by ‘security’ as she sat in the audience while another girl read a poem of thanks to us from the stage. We had been gathered below ground level in the partially restored El Basha house, an attractive, rectangular pit of sandstone with arches and stairs that led down to it on the right hand-side of the stage. At the top of the stairs, armed men gathered, suited or shirted, legs apart with their phones held at arm’s length, scanning and photographing the protesting crowd with their phones. ‘You do this for Palestine?’ shouts Hamdan in a voice somehow bigger than him and the cage of my chest feels cleaved apart. Don’t tell me we’ve come to this. Is this what happens when authorities are empowered to crack down and disempowered from providing?

From the moment of the rabid, random phone grab and the armed men shouting how it is forbidden to film security, the questions begin: ‘Where has she gone? Did they take her? Did she get her phone back? Why her? Was she filming the stage? Why did they say she was filming security? See how they spread fear? You see? It’s good that you saw this. This is what we live with every day. It is good you are here. If you weren’t, they would beat us all and destroy the building. I am sorry you saw this, we are not like this. The girl, a porcelain miniature figurine in skinny jeans and a pink headscarf, is finally tracked down, distraught, at home and persuaded to come back to the hotel for the poetry readings of Haddad and Hamdan, and the oud playing of Eskanderella. ‘It’s like a dream having you here,’ says a short-story writer, whose five-year old draws a picture for my five-year old in London, ‘and you’ll leave and we’ll be left to a nightmare, a horrible nightmare’.

‘We used to have one authority when the Israelis were here, one authority and one enemy, now with Fatah and Hamas, we have three authorities and this makes our lives hell.’

And in the darkness, light.

‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore about these tunnels,’ says one of the many students who has been in the tunnel industry, working the pulleys at the top of the well like openings for $50 per day ($100 if you go down, but you could get gassed or otherwise killed down there, as a friend of his was), ‘or about drugs’. (I am trying to find out more about the craze for a highly addictive upper, Trimadol, that has taken off since the relative ‘opening’ of the border with Egypt.) ‘I want to talk to you about literature,’ he says, ‘She walks in beauty like the night. Who wrote this?’ ‘Byron,’ someone says. ‘Ah yes, Lord Byron. I love this,’ he says with the most amazing smile, as though he wrote the lines himself.

About the Author
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

Additional Information
Tarik Hamdan is a Palestinian poet and musician, born in 1982.  His first poetry book Once When I was a Sperm was published in 2010. His poems have been translated into English, Spanish and Korean. He is the Editor in Chief of Filstin Ashabab – a monthly arts and literature magazine for young artists and writers. He is active in diverse media and art projects in Palestine, and the Arab world.

Amin Haddad is an Egyptian poet. He has published several collections of poetry. He is the founder of El-Share3 (the street) – a group of poets and musicians – which he both manages and participates in.

Youssef Rakha was born in Cairo in 1976.  Reporter, copy editor and cultural editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper.  He has published seven books in Arabic and the eighth, his second novel, is forthcoming with Dar al Saqi in October, 2012

You can read more about PalFest at www.palfest.org.

The post Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 2 appeared first on English PEN.

An oud player from Cairo from the revolutionary band Eskandarella starts strumming softly from one of the moulded plastic seats, next to the wheelchair bound women and the waiting, smoking, pacing crowd that we have become; and the holding station of the Rafah border crossing is momentarily transformed. It is as if a network of vivid magical circuitry runs now throughout that large, unloved space: a communication of something deep and connective that we feel for a transient moment, until it stops. The oud player must put the instrument away. He is not to get through the border. He and one other Egyptian, a blogger, are to be returned to Arish because they do not have the papers to show that they are exempt from conscription. Fruitless negotiations: logic on our side, rules on theirs.

We move on without those who are to follow the next day.

The swinging coach lurches and it’s a ‘Welcome to Palestine’ sign and we all cheer even though we are not so dim that we don’t know there is a sad, ironic disappointment in this proclamation. But it is a sign that was fought for, a forbidden word that is now writ high. I, for one, was once harassed and sent back to Cairo after seven hours with Israeli security because they found a Palestinian flag the size of a Smartie in my bag, back in the days when that alone was a statutory offence.

Officials await us at the border, fruit juice with bits in it, references to the struggles of Mandela, celebration of the fact that this is the first delegation of that size from the new Egypt, national PR and emotion. Hard seats and handshakes.

And then, Gaza.

By now it is dark: dark in a deep, soft way that makes the sky and the moon, full within it, appear like a felt collage. We pass an abandoned missile-struck building, grinning toothlessly out to sea, and then, it is a meditative journey up the coast, where much of the land is agricultural, or fallow, with breeze from the sea catching in rushes and billowing in the walls of greenhouses shaped like modernist oriental tents, made of a translucent fabric glowing from within. I feel as though we have snuck into a secret garden, a forbidden city.

We must be driving through the least densely populated part of the most densely populated strip of land in the world, as it takes some time before we see signs of habitation, but they come with rows of shops: solitary boys manning large desks in furniture showrooms, motorbikes parked up against walls, tractors in fields, umbrellas on fruit stands and paintings of Mickey Mouse on nursery walls. ‘It’s like Egypt,’ says one of the Egyptian writers, which is as it should be, since the countries neighbour each other, the shops, cafes, children are the same. Marriages with bands beeping through the streets take place, women lift their skirts to paddle in the sea and men sit under trees seduced by the moon.

The global porthole for viewing Gaza is the news media and it shows us a place that exists only in times of crisis: at the moment of a missile strike, at times of political unrest and violence, depicting inhabitants as victims of attacks, as though this is a population brought up to suffer, rather than people who are desperate to just get on and do stuff  like everyone else.

And this, to my mind, is where the fiction writer comes in: to introduce lives, relationships, aspirations beyond and against political events, or even in the complete absence of political events, to introduce a different truth, to say, there were people here first, before the violence of the missile, of the gun battle, before men were taken away to prisons and never seen again. Feel who we were loving, what we were hoping for, look at what we were doing and building before all this came, while this came, despite the fact that these horrors came, intruded and tried to muck it all up.

About the Author
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

She is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

The post Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 1 appeared first on English PEN.