Wednesday, 10 July 2019
Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba
The Nakba or Day of Catastrophe,saw the displacement of more than 700,000 people following the Israeli War of Independence, and saw the massacre of civilians, and the razing to the ground of hundreds of Palestinian villages. Against their will, the Nakba divided the Palestinian people between Palestine and diaspora, betwee Gaza and the West Bank, between those who hold a refugee identification card and who don't. Seventy years on, more than 5.5 million refugees are scattered all over the Middle East and the world, and are still waiting to exercise their internationally recognized right to return.
Following Comma Press’popular Iraq + 100, which asked Iraqi writers what the country will look like a century after the 2003 invasion, Palestine + 100 is a new anthology from them posing a question to contemporary Palestinian writers: what might your home city look like in the year 2048, exactly 100 years after the Nakba. How might that war reach across a century of repair and rebirth, and affect the state of the country its politics, its religion, its language, its culture and how might Palestine have finally escaped it, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line? As well as being an exercise in escaping the politics of the present in a country which some have called the largest prison in the world , this necessary anthology is an opportunity to showcase contemporary Arabic writers offering their own spin on science fiction and fantasy.The stories cover a range of approaches from SF noir, to nightmarish dystopia, to high-tech farce these stories use the blank canvas of the future to reimagine the Palestinian experience today. Along the way, we encounter drone swarms, digital uprisings, time-bending VR, peace treaties that span parallel universes, and even a Palestinian superhero, in probably the first anthology of science fiction from Palestine ever. Featuring stories from a range of writers, including: Talal Abu Shawish, Liana Badr, Selma Dabbagh, Samir El-Youssef, Anwar Hamed, Mazen Maarouf, Ahmed Masoud, Nayrouz Qarmout, and Rawan Yaghi.The voices contained within demnd to be heard.
Translated from the Arabic by Raph Cormack, Mohamed Ghalaieny, Andrew Leber, Thoraya El-Rayyes, Yasmine Seale and Jonathan Wright.
Winner of a PEN Translates Award:
.https://www.englishpen.org/translation/pen-translates-autumn-2018-awards-announced/
Comma Press is a not-for-profit publishing initiative dedicated to promoting new writing, with an emphasis on the short story. It is committed to a spirit of risk-taking and challenging publishing, free of the commercial pressures on mainstream houses. In April 2012, Comma became one of the Arts Council's new National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs). The collection will not be available until July the 25th. More details below.
https://commapress.co.uk/books/palestine-100/
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