Writing Palestine Now, Writing Palestine Again: A Conversation with Sara Haddad and Hasib Hourani

As Palestinian statehood seemed ever more out of reach in the wake of 1967’s Six Day War, the writer Ghassan Kanafani insisted that ‘the immediate demand – along with the creation of the state of Palestine – is the creation of a people who embody the cause of Palestine.’ Kanafani saw writing as a crucial means of meeting the second demand, with its capacity to shape Palestinian identity and to give significant form to Palestinians’ experiences of dispossession and resistance. In this seminar, Sara Haddad and Hasib Hourani will discuss writing Palestine in 2025 as, once again, its existence is imperilled. Haddad’s novella The Sunbird (UQP, 2024) and Hourani’s long poem rock flight (Giramondo, 2024) both move fluidly between present and past, using the capacities of literary form to challenge dominant narratives and to imagine communities of resistance. The conversation will be facilitated by Ben Etherington.

Sara Haddad is an editor and writer who has worked in publishing for thirty-five years. A Lebanese Australian, she lives on Gadigal land with her husband and two children. She hopes that one day all Palestinians will be free to return to their country and live there without fear.

Hasib Hourani is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator living on Gadigal Country in Sydney. His work has been published in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry and Cordite, among others. He is a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter Scheme and his 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted for The LIMINAL & Pantera Press Nonfiction prize and published in their 2022 anthology, Against Disappearance. rock flight is his first book (Giramondo 2024).

Ben Etherington is an associate professor in English at Western Sydney University. He wrote his Master’s thesis on the musical criticism of Edward Said and was an Edward W Said fellow at Columbia University in 2019. He’s currently writing a book on the poetics of anglophone Caribbean Creole verse between the abolition of slavery and decolonization. He is also collaborating with the Sydney-based Jamaican writer Sienna Brown on a podcast series about the history of Caribbean people in Australia.