In this episode we speak with poet Asmaa Azaizeh about Palestinian poetry, the Palestinian cultural scene in the 1948 areas, and the intergenerational relations accumulated along the history of Palestinian literature.

Asmaa Azaizeh is a writer and poet based in Haifa, she was born in 1985 in the village of Daburieh, in the lower Galilee. She received a Bachelor in English literature and journalism from the University of Haifa in 2006, and worked in radio, television and print journalism for several years. She was appointed in 2012 as the first executive director of the Mahmoud Darwish museum in Ramallah. She was the recipient of the Qattan Award for young writers in 2010 for her first poetry collection Liwa. Since then she has published Like The Woman From Lod Bore Me (2015), Don’t Believe Me If I Talk To You About War (2019), and The Body I Once Climbed (2022). Her poetry has been translated to English, German, Swedish, French, Dutch, Italian, Farsi and Spanish. Until the beginning of 2020 she was a curator at Fattoush Bookstore & Café in Haifa.

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Produced by the PalREAD – Country of Words project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC)

Interviewer and co-editor: Rand Khdeir

Writer, Producer and Editor: Ibrahim Abdou

Host & Concept Design: Refqa Abu-Remaileh

Research Support: Hanan Natour

Sound Editing & Design: Ziad Fayed

VO Recording: Gianpiero Tari

Music: “The Astounding Eyes of Rita” by Anouar Brahem (ECM Records, 2009)

Cover Art: Alexandra Sophia Handal

Production, logistics and technical support: Kerning Cultures