Bøker av Raja Shehadeh

When the author first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was travelling through a vanishing landscape. Recording how the land felt and looked before various calamities, this title attempts to preserve, at least in words, the Palestinian natural treasures that many Palestinians never know.

'Palestine's greatest prose writer' Observer'Shehadeh is a great inquiring spirit with a tone that is vivid, ironic, melancholy and wise' Colm TóibínBattered by repeated suicide bombs, the Israeli army invaded Palestine in April 2002 and held many of the principal towns, including Ramallah, under siege. A tank stood at the end of Raja Shehadeh's road; there were Israeli soldiers on the rooftops; his mother was sick, and he couldn't cross town to help her.Shehadeh - winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize and a finalist for the 2023 National Book Awards - kept a diary. This is an account of what it is like to be under siege: the terror, the frustrations, as well as the moments of poignant relief and reflection on the profound crisis gripping both Palestine and Israel.

Since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, the Nakba (or 'disaster' as the Palestinians call it), there have been many opportunities to move towards peace and equality between Palestine and Israel - after the Six-Day War in 1967, the Oslo Agreement and even the 7 October 2023 War. Each opportunity has been rejected by Israel, which is why life is unbearable in the West Bank now and there is genocide in Gaza. This book explores what went wrong again and again, and why. And how it could still be different. It is human nature to feel prejudice. But in this haunting meditation on Palestine and Israel, Shehadeh suggests that this does not mean the two nations cannot live together to their mutual benefit and co-existence. In graceful, devastatingly observed prose, this is a fresh reflection on the conflict in a time of great need.

Forgotten is a search for hidden or neglected memorials and places in historic Palestine - now Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories - and what they might tell us about the land and the people who have lived (and are living) on our small slip of earth between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.From ancient city ruins to the Nabi 'Ukkasha mosque and tomb, acclaimed writers and researchers Raja Shehadeh and Penny Johnson ask: what has been memorialised, and what lies unseen, abandoned or erased - and why? Whether standing on a high cliff overlooking Lebanon or the lowest land-based elevation on earth at the Dead Sea, they explore lost connections in a fragmented land.In elegiac, elegant prose, Shehadeh and Johnson grapple not only with questions of Israeli resistance to acknowledging the Nakba - the 1948 catastrophe for Palestinians - but also with the complicated history of Palestinian commemoration in our own time.

Life in Palestine today - what it is really like - day to day, from the Orwell Prize winning author, Raja Shehadeh.