About Palestine - 1: reimagining Palestine's past
The British Library’s Curator of Arabic Collections, Daniel Lowe, gives the introduction to an evening celebrating the launch of a brand new anthology: Palestine - 1. Edited by Basma Ghalayini, the collection asks ten Palestinian writers to re-imagine Palestine the year before the Nakba – the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948 – and to explore the events leading up to it, on a village-by-village basis. Every writer has been allocated a specific village to write about, and challenged to explore the atmosphere of this moment through fantastical, supernatural and speculative fiction devices.
Like its counterpart anthology (Palestine + 100) this collection uses genre tropes to re-examine this experience, much as Guillermo Del Torro used horror to explore the Spanish Civil War in films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, or Godzilla offered a science fiction metaphor for the trauma of nuclear warfare and arms testing in the 1940s and 50s.
Featuring fiction by Mazen Mahrouf, Selma Dabbagh, Anwar Hamed, Nadia Shammas, Khaled Hourani, Mahmoud Shukair, Maya Abu al-Hayat, Yara Alghadban, Sonia Sulaiman and more.
Two of the featured writers, Selma Dabbagh and Anwar Hamed, join the editor Basma Ghalayini to explore the themes and voices within this ambitious new anthology.
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Venue and bar opening times
This is an in-person only event in the British Library Knowledge Centre.
The Knowledge Centre and bar open from 18.00.
Please arrive no later than 15 minutes before the start time of this event. If you have specific access requirements please email customer@bl.uk
Concessions
There are a range of concessions available. These include discounts for British Library Members, Young Persons (16–25s), and visitors on Universal/Pension Credit and free entry for carers.
Selma Dabbagh
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction and a lawyer.
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Her first novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, 2011) was mainly set in Gaza. She is also the editor of We Wrote in Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi, 2021). She contributed a story to Palestine +100 that was also developed into a play by WDR (German radio). She is also a lawyer, having worked in the fields of international human rights and criminal law for NGOs in Palestine, Egypt and the UK. She has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths University and an LLM from SOAS.
Anwar Hamed
Anwar Hamed is a Palestinian-British-Hungarian novelist, literary critic and journalist.
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He writes in Arabic, Hungarian and English, and has ten novels published in Arabic and some in Hungarian. His short story entitled 'The Key' was published in the Palestine +100 (Comma Press), and was longlisted for the British Science Fiction Awards, and adapted for screen. His novel Jaffa Prepares Morning Coffee was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction.
Basma Ghalayini
Basma Ghalayini is an editor and translator, born in Khan Younis and raised in Gaza City.
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Her previous translations have been published by Commonwealth Writers, Deep Vellum Press and Comma Press (Banthology, The Book of Cairo, The Book of Ramallah and others). She is the editor of Palestine + 100: Stories from a Century After the Nakba (Comma Press 2019) and Palestine Minus One (Comma Press 2025). She is the series editor of Comma Press' Arabic titles, and currently lives in Manchester.
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