ÇEM JİYANÊ NEXŞ DİKİN
Spore hosts
Save the Date
Dreams of Ayn Ara
Book launch and panel discussion with Sara Abou Ghazal, Rana Issa & Katharine Halls
14. November 2026
18.00-20.00
18.00-20.00
Save the Date
For free
For adults
in English
This event celebrates the publication of Dreams of Ayn Ara, a new novel by Palestinian writer Sara Abou Ghazal, translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls and published by the Feminist Press (North America) and Mercier Press (Ireland).
Abou Ghazal’s English-language debut traces the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family in the wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. At every turn, their hopes of an ordinary existence are brutally thwarted by false friends, renewed violence, and memories so vivid they refuse to be consigned to the past. Building to a surreal crescendo, Dreams of Ayn Ara maps the cosmic upheaval in which Zionist settler colonialism denies Palestinians not only a homeland, but a future.
Cover of DREAMS OF AYN ARA
A gem of a book, fierce and tender, devastating and exhilarating in one swoop … Abou Ghazal lays bare the full tragedy and majesty of Palestinian life at its boiling point—a rebellion at once against and for the world in its entirety.
– Nasser Abourahme, author of The Time Beneath the Concrete
For this book launch, Sara Abou Ghazal and her translator Katharine Halls will be joined in conversation by writer and scholar Rana Issa, whose own memoir of growing up in the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon appeared in Arabic earlier this year.
Part of a loosely-conceived series of events highlighting exciting, radical writing from Palestine and beyond that addresses potential futures between the river and the sea. Previous events have taken place at the Volksbühne’s Roter Salon.
Event description has been partly adapted from the publisher's text.
