Literature Against Erasure
About the event
As the Israeli occupation's genocide in Gaza continues in real time, literature has become an important space for Palestinians to speak for themselves and their lives behind the headlines. This event brings together voices from two publications platforming these stories.
Based on interviews with survivors from across Gaza, Samar Yazbek’s Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life (Fitzcarraldo) gathers testimonies of loss, survival, and endurance, asking how we remember lives too often reduced to numbers through mainstream media coverage. Voices of Resistance (Comma) shares first-person diaries by four women writers (Nahil Mohana, Ala'a Obaid, Sondos Sabra and Batool Abu Akleen) living through bombardment, displacement, and famine, unveiling intimate accounts of grief, survival, humour, and care for one another.
During the event, Samar Yazbek will read from Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, and Sondos Sabra, will read her first-hand account of Israeli airstrikes, forced displacement and engineered famine. Both will be joined by Leri Price in a conversation moderated by Yasmin El-Rifae,.
Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.
Sondos Sabra is a writer and translator with a bachelor's degree in English Literature from the Islamic University of Gaza, where she studied under the poet Dr Refaat Alareer, who was murdered in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Sondos is a co-author of Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide. In December 2023, three of her nieces and nephews were murdered by an Israeli rocket. Sondos is a founding member of the Shaghaf Youth Initiative, where discussions on texts and literary works are organised. Her journalism has appeared in The New Statesman and The Guardian. She left Gaza in late 2025 and is studying for an MA in the UK.
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. She was born in 1970 and studied Arabic literature at Latakia University. Yazbek has been a prominent advocate for human rights and more specifically women’s rights in Syria. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 by Beirut39, organised by the Hay Festival. In 2012, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize ‘International writer of courage’ for her book In the Crossfire, and received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize the following year. In 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of twelve International Writers. Yazbek has published two short story collections, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, 2021, and 2019. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, editor, and coorganizer of The Palestine Festival of Literature. She is the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022) and her essays and criticism have recently appeared in The Journal of Palestine Studies and The New York Review of Books. She is a contributing editor to Parapraxis and Lux magazines. Yasmin studies psychoanalytic theory at Birkbeck, University of London.
