Palestine Book Award Recipients | الفائزين بجائزة كتاب فلسطين: مصعب أبو توهة وهبة حايك

This Coffee & Books session will feature authors Mosab Abu Toha & Heba Hayek in conversation with Laura Albast about their Palestine Book Award-winning works, Things You May Find in My Ear and Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies.

Mosab Abu Toha’s poems emerge from his experience of growing up in Gaza, living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack.

“Mosab Abu Toha is an astonishingly gifted young poet from Gaza, almost a seer with his eloquent lyrical vernacular … His poems break my heart and awaken it, at the same time. I feel I have been waiting for his work all my life.”—Naomi Shihab Nye

Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mother.

‘A book I devoured in a single sitting.’ — Middle East Eye