IMEU : Literature

Palestinian Writer Suad Amiry Wins Italy's Nonino Prize for Promoting Peace (Arabic Literature)

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 12:43:27 PST

Sharp, funny Palestinian writer Suad Amiry has won one of Italy’s Nonino prizes — along with Portugeuse novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes, Italian psychiatrist Giuseppe Dell’Acqua, and French philosopher Michel Serres — for “her work to promote peace.”

Links between struggle and art probed in new book on Palestinian poets (Sarah Irving, The Electronic Intifada)

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 03:35:34 PST

Khaled Furani's Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry is an anthropological study of Palestinian poets, particularly those living in Israel and the occupied West Bank. Furani interviewed writers and attended readings and festivals in Palestine and the wider Arab world, while providing historical background drawn from poetry journals such as al-Jadid and the cultural pages of papers such as al-Ittihad.

Said Aburish: Palestinian journalist, biographer and historian (Andrew Lycett, The Guardian)

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 03:03:31 PST

The controversial Palestinian journalist and historian Said Aburish, who has died aged 77, did much to illuminate the relationship between the Middle East and the west. His career as published author started with Pay-off (1985), which drew on his personal involvement in order to expose the practices of middle-men and fixers in the Arab world during the boom years following the oil price rises of 1973-74.

Gabi Baramki: Intellectual and defender of education (IMEU)

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 08:50:07 PST

Gabriel (Gabi) Baramki passed away on August 30, 2012, at the age of 82. A highly-respected Palestinian intellectual, Baramki served as both Vice President and acting President of Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank, where he developed the university's first degree-granting program in 1972. He co-founded the Palestinian European Academic Cooperation in Education Program and the Palestinian Council for Higher Education. In 2009, he published "Peaceful Resistance: Building a Palestinian University Under Occupation."

Flying lamb, Lionel Messi: Palestinian fantastic concoction grabs international award (Hossam Ezzedine, Middle East Online)

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 08:07:58 PST

It was the trauma of seeing Israeli troops raze homes in the Bedouin community where she lives that inspired 14-year-old Salha Hamadin to write an award-winning fairy tale. Earlier this year, Salha, who comes from an impoverished Palestinian Bedouin community near Jerusalem, was crowned winner of the teenage category of the Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tale Bay competition, which saw 1,200 entries from around the world by youngsters aged 11 to 16.

Occupation Diaries by Raja Shehadeh (Jonathan Heawood, The Guardian)

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 07:25:01 PST

Raja Shehadeh is an angry man. He is angry about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the illegal settlements that dot his beloved Palestinian landscape and the roads that divide the people of this territory. And he is angry about the failure of Israel's allies and donors to prevent the discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs that he encounters in his life as an activist and a lawyer.

Palestine 5K aims to empower children, build community (Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, The Electronic Intifada)

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 10:16:57 PST

Organizers of the upcoming Palestine 5K Run/Walk through the West Bank city of Birzeit, near Ramallah, have big goals. They hope the event will not only help build strong, local programs for Palestinian children, but will most importantly create a sense of community and belonging among people.

A love story, a Palestinian story (Lina al-Sharif, The Electronic Intifada )

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:10:28 PST

The idea of writing about something very personal is haunting me. As a Palestinian, it’s really hard to know where to draw the line between the political and the personal. But, in Palestine, the personal is political and the political is the personal. For now, I’ll keep the political away and dig down into the personal.

My blog Live from Gaza has been an outlet for me to write some simple and humble accounts coming from a very ordinary person living under extraordinary circumstances.

Being a woman from Gaza formed the person that I am today.

Poet in Andaluc�a (Nathalie Handal, Rattapallax)

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:16:33 PST

Federico García Lorca lived in Manhattan from 1929 to 1930, and the poetry he wrote about the city, Poet in New York, was posthumously published in 1940. Eighty years after Lorca's sojourn in America, and myself a poet in New York of Middle Eastern as well as Mediterranean roots, I went to Spain to write Poet in Andalucía. I recreated Lorca's journey in reverse. Poet in Andalucía is a meditation on the past and the present.

Interview with Elmaz Abinader, Palestine Writing Workshop (Linah al-Saafin)

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 02:30:46 PST

Although Elmaz was born into a Lebanese family, she lived in the US her whole life. Most of her work (Children of the Roojme, a Family's Journey from Lebanon, In the Country of my Dreams) centers on Arabs or Arab-Americans coping and dealing with antagonistic measures present in their daily lives. It was interesting to see where this particular theme fit within her experience of teaching for the first time in the occupied West Bank, and her perspective on the role of creative writing in Palestine.