The Edible Archive: Palestinian Memory and Resistance

His work has been featured in publications including BBC News, CNN, The Guardian, Conde Nast Traveller and the New York Times. His debut cookbook Bethlehem: A Celebration of Palestinian Food (2024) was named one of the LA Times Best Cookbooks of 2024 and won the Guild of Food Writers’ International or Regional Cookery Book Award 2025. It was also shortlisted for the 2025 British Library Narrative Cookery Book Food Awards. He opened his first restaurant, Fawda, in Bethlehem in 2015, followed by Akub in London (2023) and Louf in Toronto (2024). Across his restaurants he honours Palestine’s best produce and combines age-old recipes with contemporary culinary techniques.

Madees has been on the board of directors of EcoPalestine since 2018, an NGO for Palestinian water and environmental issues. In 2010, she spoke at TEDxHolyland as an advocate for family businesses, such as Taybeh, operating under an adverse environment with challenging circumstances. Since 2007, she has been organising the annual Taybeh Oktoberfest, a two-day event that celebrates Palestinian produce and culture.

As an artist, researcher, and writer, she uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and protection of agrobiodiversity. Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library in 2014, where she works with farmers in Palestine and around the world. As an extension of this, she created The Traveling Kitchen, a social engagement project aimed at bringing to the forefront conversations about climate crisis, food politics, and the imagining of new worlds.

In 2002 with Noam Bar and Yotam Ottolenghi, he co-founded Ottolenghi, a group of delis and restaurants, and alongside Yotam, Sami Tamimi co-authored two bestselling cookbooks: Ottolenghi: The Cookbook and Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Sami’s third cookbook Falastin, co-authored with Tara Wigley, won the Fortnum & Mason Cookery Book of the 2021 and his latest and first solo cookbook, Boustany, was named as one of best cookbooks in 2025 by New York Times.

She’s been published in The Evening Standard, Good Housekeeping, Delicious and Palestine in America and her short fiction has been published in the literary magazine The Other Side of Hope, with one story nominated for a Best of the Net Award. She is the recipient of Be Inclusive Hospitality’s Writer of the Year award 2025 and was a finalist in the Yan Kit So Awards 2025 and is on the Committee of the Guild of Food Writers.