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.