Atef Abu Saif
From 21 May to 16 July 2026

The Palestinian writer Atef Abu Saif was born in 1973 in the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza. He holds a Master’s from the University of Bradford, the United Kingdom, and a PhD in political and social sciences from the University of Florence, Italy. He taught political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza and served as the Palestinian Minister of Culture from 2019 to 2024. Translated into a number of languages, his work features a range of genres, short story collections, plays, and novels, including Shadows in the Memory (1997), Tales of the Harvest Night (1998), Running in Place (2019), and A Suspended Life (2014), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Arabic Booker Prize. His diary dispatches written during the first seventy-five days of the Israel-Gaza War have been collected in one volume and published under the title Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (Comma Press, 2024). He also writes a weekly column for the Palestinian newspaper Ayyam.