Faces of Palestinian Literature

About Literature

A homeland written down.

Palestinian literature has long carried what maps could not. In the 1930s Ibrahim Tuqan wrote “Mawtini”, a poem still sung across the Arab world, and his sister Fadwa Tuqan became one of the great poets of her generation.

After 1948, writing became a way to hold on. Ghassan Kanafani gave a name to “resistance literature”, Mahmoud Darwish turned an identity card into a poem in 1964, and Edward Said told his people’s story to readers in the West. A new generation, from Adania Shibli to Susan Abulhawa, has carried it to readers around the world.

The people in this path write poems, novels, memoirs and essays. Many wrote in exile, some in prison, and some, like Refaat Alareer in Gaza, taught others to tell their own stories.