This Is Not A Border

by Ahdaf Soueif

  Teju Cole, novelist, essayist and photographer, was born in the United States and raised in Nigeria. His work has been recognized with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, and the Windham Campbell Prize, among other honours. He is photography critic of the New York Times Magazine.

  Molly Crabapple is an artist, journalist and author of the memoir Drawing Blood. She has drawn in and reported from Guantánamo Bay, American prisons, Abu Dhabi’s migrant labour camps, and in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Iraqi Kurdistan. Crabapple is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for publications including the New York Times, the Paris Review and Vanity Fair. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

  Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction. Her first novel, Out of It (Bloomsbury), set between Gaza, London and the Gulf, was a Guardian Book of the Year in 2011 and 2012. Her short stories have been published by Granta, the British Council, Wasafiri, Al-Saqi among others. In 2014 her play The Brick was produced by BBC Radio 4 and nominated for an Imison Award. She regularly writes for the Electronic Intifada on Palestinian culture and has written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, GQ and other publications.

  Mahmoud Darwish was born near Akka in 1941 and died in Houston in 2008. He had been the Arab world’s pre-eminent poet for a quarter of a century, with more than 20 published volumes, numerous awards, and thousands filling stadiums at his readings. Darwish was also at the heart of the political struggle for Palestine, joining both the Israeli Communist Party and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Darwish wrote Palestine’s Declaration of Statehood announced by Yasir Arafat in Algiers in 1988, but resigned from the Executive of the PLO five years later over the Oslo Accords.

  Born in Jerusalem in 1978, Najwan Darwish is one of the most prominent Arabic-language poets of his generation. In 2009 he was on Beirut’s Hay Festival list of ‘39 best Arab authors under the age of 39’. Darwish’s poetry has been translated into twenty languages. In 2014 US National Public Radio (NPR) listed his book Nothing More To Lose (New York Review Books, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid) as one of the best books of the year. Currently he is the chief editor of the cultural section of Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper, and serves as literary adviser to PalFest.

  Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography) and Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism). His latest book is White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is writer in residence at the University of Southern California.

  Adam Foulds is a poet and novelist from London. He has been the recipient of a number of literary awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, the Costa Poetry Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the South Bank Show Prize for Literature, the E. M. Forster Award, the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature. He was named one of Granta magazine’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013 and of the Poetry Book Society’s Next Generation Poets in 2014. His latest novel, In the Wolf’s Mouth, was published in 2014.

  Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer whose work appears internationally, including in the Guardian, the New York Times and the Boston Globe. She is the author of the novels A Disobedient Girl (2009) and On Sal Mal Lane (2013), a New York Times Editor’s Choice, both appearing in translation, and editor of Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (2015). She is a contributing editor of the Asian American Literary Review and Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, has won the Sister Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the Janet H. Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman, and blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics.

  Omar Robert Hamilton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer, and a co-founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature. He is the author of the novel The City Always Wins, and has written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Mada Masr and Guernica.

  A poet raised in Brooklyn, New York, Suheir Hammad’s poems have been widely anthologised and reinterpreted on to stage and screen. She is the author of Born Palestinian, Born Black, Drops of This Story, ZaatarDiva and breaking poems. Reading her poems in Palestine with PalFest was a dream come true.

  Nathalie Handal’s recent books include The Republics, lauded as ‘one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers’ and winner of the Arab American Book Award and the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing; the best-selling The Invisible Star; the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía; and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a fellow of the Lannan Foundation, the Centro Andaluz de las Letras and the Fondazione di Venezia, and the recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honours. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the column ‘The City and the Writer’ for Words without Borders. She serves on the board of PalFest.

  Mohammed Hanif is the author of novels A Case of Exploding Mangoes and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti. He wrote the libretto for the opera Bhutto and is a contributing columnist for the International New York Times and BBC Urdu. He lives in Karachi.

  Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, where the pieces in this anthology first appeared. His translations of Rimbaud are published in Penguin Classics. He is the co-translator of Modern French Philosophy by Vincent Descombes. His memoir Mother Country is about the discovery of parents, absent and present. He has reported often on refugees and migrants in Europe, North Africa and the US. Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants out of the Rich World appeared in 2012. He has also reported from sub-Saharan Africa and run non-fiction and editing workshops in Palestine.

  A PalFest veteran, Rachel Holmes is the author most recently of Eleanor Marx: A Life. Her previous books include The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman and The Secret Life of Dr James Barry. Holmes curated many programmes with Palestinian artists while Director of Literature at London’s Southbank Centre. From 2009 to 2014 she was tutor and writer in residence at the Palestine Writing Workshop in the West Bank, a PalFest initiative. She is currently writing a book about Sylvia Pankhurst.

  John Horner was brought up in Kenya. He began his advertising career in London in 1965. After twelve years he started his own agency. He sold the business and worked in various marketing roles before buying into one of the most successful model agencies in the world, Models 1, where he still works today. His entrepreneurial spirit involves him in businesses as diverse as children’s clothing, costume jewellery and perfume. He is a trustee to the Jaipur Heritage Trust and a mentor to the Prince’s Trust and the Jack Wills Young Entrepreneurs programme and is PalFest’s treasurer and a member of its founding board.

  Remi Kanazi is a poet, writer and organiser based in New York City. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Before the Next Bomb Drops: Rising Up from Brooklyn to Palestine and Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine, and the editor of the anthology Poets For Palestine. He is a Lannan Residency fellow and an advisory committee member for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.

  Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem, but grew up in England. She is a leading Palestinian academic, activist and writer and her publications include In search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine, and, most recently, Return: A Palestinain Memoir. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, at the University of Exeter.

  Brigid Keenan has worked as an editor on Nova magazine, the Observer and the Sunday Times. She has published two fashion histories as well as Travels in Kashmir, Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City, the best-selling Diplomatic Baggage and its sequel, Packing Up. Her most recent book, Fu
ll Marks for Trying, is a memoir of her childhood in India and her days as a young fashion editor at the dawn of the 60s in London. She has spent most of her life in far-flung postings with her diplomat husband. Keenan is currently fashion editor of Oldie magazine. She is a founding member of the PalFest board.

  Mercedes Kemp is writer and director of community and research for WildWorks Theatre Company and senior lecturer in fine art at Falmouth University. She was born and grew up in Andalusia. For the past forty years she has lived in Cornwall, UK. She travels with WildWorks, developing text for site-specific theatre. Her method involves a kind of eclectic ethnographic research into a variety of sources: archives, libraries, cemeteries, bus stops, town gossips, old photographs, conversations and, above all, a close observation of the process of memory and its effect on the value that people place on their environments.

  Omar El-Khairy’s plays include Burst, Sour Lips, The Keepers of Infinite Space and The Chaplain: or, a short tale of how we learned to love good Muslims while torturing bad ones. His latest play Homegrown was published in 2017. El-Khairy is a former Leverhulme associate playwright at the Bush Theatre and a founding member of Paper Tiger, a collective of theatre and film-makers, working collaboratively and autonomously. His short film No Exit received its world premiere at last year’s Dubai International Film Festival. He holds a PhD on sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

  Nancy Kricorian is a New York City-based writer and activist. She is the author of the novels Zabelle, Dreams of Bread and Fire, and most recently All The Light There Was, which is set in the Armenian community of Paris during World War II.

  Sabrina Mahfouz is a British Egyptian playwright, poet and screenwriter. Her 2016 plays are With a Little Bit of Luck (Paines Plough), Slug (nabokov), Battleface (Bush Theatre), Layla’s Room (Theatre Centre) and The Love I Feel Is Red (Tobacco Factory Theatres). Her TV short Breaking the Code was produced by BBC3 and BBC Drama earlier this year. Her play Chef won a 2014 Fringe First Award, and Clean was produced by Traverse Theatre and transferred to New York in 2014. She has been the Sky Arts Academy scholar for poetry, Leverhulme playwright in residence and associate artist at the Bush Theatre.

  Jamal Mahjoub was born in London and brought up in Khartoum, Sudan. His literary novels include Travelling with Djinns and Nubian Indigo. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications. He also writes crime fiction as Parker Bilal: The Makana series takes place in Egypt in the decade prior to the Arab revolutions. He has lived in Denmark, Spain and currently Amsterdam.

  Henning Mankell (1948–2015) was a crime writer, children’s author and dramatist, best known for his series of mystery novels featuring Inspector Kurt Wallander. He was a committed political and social activist and after attending PalFest in 2009 he took part in the following year’s Freedom Flotilla to Gaza and was arrested and deported to Sweden.

  Claire Messud is the author of four novels and a book of novellas, including The Emperor’s Children (2006), an international best-seller which was translated into over twenty languages. Her most recent novel, The Woman Upstairs, was published in 2013. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and the Financial Times (London). She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She visited Palestine as part of PalFest 2009.

  China Miéville is the author of several novels, including The City & the City and Embassytown, the short-story collection Three Moments of an Explosion and the novella This Census-Taker. His non-fiction includes London’s Overthrow and Between Equal Rights, a study of international law. He is a founding editor of the journal Salvage.

  Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including The Romantics: A Novel and From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. He writes political and literary essays for the Guardian, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, and is a columnist for Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review. His most recent book is Age of Anger: A History of the Present.

  Deborah Moggach has written eighteen novels, several of which she has adapted as TV dramas. Her novel The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel was made into a hit movie starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and her novel Tulip Fever, set in Vermeer’s Amsterdam, is to be released in early 2017. She also wrote the BAFTA-nominated screenplay for Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley, and adapted Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate for the BBC. She lives in London and Wales, and her latest novel, Something to Hide, was published in 2015. She is on the council of the Royal Society of Literature, is a past chair of the Society of Authors and was on the executive committee of PEN, the writers’ organisation which campaigns for freedom of speech.

  Muiz is a visual communicator who specialises in bilingual art direction of Latin and Arab scripts. His visual explorations of the historical, cultural and political legacy of language through typography and graphic design have been published in four continents and were featured as art in a solo exhibition in the Nour Festival of Arts, London (2012). Muiz continues to explore identity by de-colonising and de-constructing heritage arts through radical experimentation, in an effort to honour the legacy of master craftsmen whose work defied the separation of the arts from science.

  Maath Musleh is a Palestinian journalist and academic from Beit Safafa in Jerusalem. He obtained his masters in political journalism from City University in London and is currently head of the Humanities/Arts Division at Al-Quds Bard College. He has worked with PalFest as a social media specialist and general consultant since 2014.

  Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and has lived in Canada since 1963. His books include The Cat’s Table, Anil’s Ghost, The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion and Coming Through Slaughter, a memoir called Running in the Family and The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. His collections of poetry include The Cinnamon Peeler and Handwriting.

  Michael Palin established his reputation with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several films with Monty Python, as well as a BAFTA-winning performance as the hapless Ken in A Fish Called Wanda. Palin has written books to accompany his eight very successful BBC travel series and he has also published three volumes of diaries. In 2014 with his fellow Pythons he performed a ten-night sell-out show at the 02 Arena in London. Between 2009 and 2012 Palin was president of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2013 he was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship.

  Ed Pavlić is the author of six collections of poems and two critical books. His most recent works are Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners, Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno and Visiting Hours at the Color Line. He lives in Athens, Georgia and teaches at the University of Georgia.

  Yasmin El-Rifae joined the PalFest team in 2013. She worked as a journalist and human rights researcher in Cairo and New York. She is writing her first book, inspired by a civilian group that combated sexual assaults during protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

  Atef Abu Saif was born in Jabaliya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip in 1973. He has published six novels and two collections of short stories. His novel A Suspended Life (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arab Fiction. His account of the 2014 war on Gaza was published in English as The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City under Fire. He studied at the Universities of Birzeit and Bradford and at the European University Institute in Florence and has written several books on politics, his academic speciality.

  Kamila Shamsie is the author of six novels, including Burnt Shadows (shortlisted for the Orange Prize) and A God in Every Stone (shortlisted for the Baileys Prize). Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan’s Academy of Letters. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2013 was named a Granta Best of Young British Novelist. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.

  Raja Shehadeh is a writer and a lawyer who founded the pioneering Palestinian
human rights organisation Al-Haq. Shehadeh is the author of several acclaimed books including Strangers in the House, A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle, Occupation Diaries and Language of War, Language of Peace and the winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize for Palestinian Walks. He lives in Ramallah in Palestine. His latest book is Where the Line is Drawn, Crossing Boundaries in Occupied Palestine.

  Gillian Slovo is a South African-born novelist and playwright. She has published twelve novels including her latest, Ten Days, her Orange Prize-shortlisted Ice Road and Red Dust, which won France’s Temoin du Monde prize and was made into a film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her family memoir, Every Secret Thing, tells the story of her activist parents Ruth First and Joe Slovo. Gillian has written three verbatim plays: Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (with Victoria Brittain), The Riots and Another World: Losing our Children to Islamic State, which played in London’s National Theatre in 2016.

  Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted The Map of Love as well as the memoir of the January 2011 revolution, Cairo: A City Transformed. She co-founded the Palestine Festival of Literature and is based in both Cairo and London.

  Linda Spalding was born in Kansas and lived in Hawaii before migrating to Toronto in 1982. Her non-fiction work The Follow was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. Who Named the Knife is an intimate portrait of her relationship as a juror with the defendant in a murder trial. She has written five novels, including The Purchase, which won the Governor General’s Award for fiction and, most recently, A Reckoning.

  William Sutcliffe is the author of seven novels, including the international best-seller Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the 2014 CILIP Carnegie Medal. His work has been translated into twenty-six languages. We See Everything, set in a reimagined London which has been reduced to the condition of Gaza, will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2017.