This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature

About the Author

William Sutcliffe is the author of twelve novels, including the international bestseller Are You Experienced? and The Wall, which was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He has written for adults, young adults and children, and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. His 2008 novel Whatever Makes You Happy is now a Netflix Original film starring Patricia Arquette, Felicity Huffman and Angela Bassett. It was released in August 2019 under the title Otherhood.

His latest novel, The Gifted, The Talented and Me, was described by The Times as 'dangerously funny' and by the Guardian as 'refreshingly hilarious'.

Omar Robert Hamilton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. Based in Cairo and New York, he has written for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and Guernica. He is cofounder of both Mosireen, a Cairo media collective formed in 2011, and the Palestine Festival of Literature. The City Always Wins is his debut novel.

MICHAEL PALIN is a comedian, novelist, actor, playwright, and founding member of Monty Python. He is the author of the novel Hemingway's Chair as well as several books on the history of Monty Python, including The Pythons, and numerous travel guides, including Brazil and Sahara.  He also happens to be one of the funniest people on the planet.  He lives in London, England.

China Mieville has a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He lives in England. He is the author of several books, including King Rat, which was nominated for both the International Horror Guild and Bram Stoker Awards for best first novel, and Perdido Street Station, winner of the 2001 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Adam Foulds is a British novelist and poet. He is the author of The Quickening Maze, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the European Union Prize for Literature, and The Broken Word, which won the Costa Poetry Award and the Somerset Maugham Award. He received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.

Gillian Slovo is an author, journalist, playwright and the President of English Pen. Gillian has written 12 novels including Black Orchids and Red Dust, which won the RFI Temoin du Monde prize in France and was made into a film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her novel Ice Road was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction and her family memoir, Every Secret Thing, was an international bestseller. Her play Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom , co-written for the Tricycle Theatre, has played in theatres around the world including New York and Washington DC. Her edited interviews with women politicians was put on as part of the Tricycle's 2010 Women Power and Politics Season. In 2009 she won an amnesty media award for her article on children in detention. She is a reviewer, opinion writer and in 2008 wrote a column for the South African newspaper, The Star.

Geoff Dyer is the author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, among other novels, and several nonfiction books, including Out of Sheer Rage. He won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012 for Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. He lives in Los Angeles.

Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of al-Birweh in what was then Western Galilee, Palestine. He published more than twenty volumes of poetry and ten volumes of prose. He was the recipient of numerous awards for both his poetry and his political activism.

Architect and writer Suad Amiry lives in Ramallah where she is director of the Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation. She received the Italian Viareggio-Versilia Prize for Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries in 2004.

Sabrina Mahfouz has recently been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and is the recipient of the 2018 King's Alumni Arts & Culture Award. She has won a Sky Arts Academy Award for Poetry, a Westminster Prize for New Playwrights and a Fringe First Award for her play Chef. Her play With a Little Bit of Luck won the 2019 Best Drama Production at the BBC Radio & Music Awards. She also writes for children and her play Zeraffa Giraffa won a 2018 Off West End Award.

Sabrina is the editor of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a 2017 Guardian Book of the Year and the forthcoming Smashing It: Working Class Artists on Life, Art and Making It Happen. She's an essay contributor to the multi-award-winning The Good Immigrant and is currently writing a biopic of the rapper and producer Wiley, for Pulse Films.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and several other books. He is a columnist at Bloomberg View and writes regularly for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in London.

Kamila Shamsie is the author of several novels: In the City by the Sea; Kartography (both shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize); Salt and Saffron; Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Three of her novels have received awards from Pakistan's Academy of Letters. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2013 was named a Granta's Best of Young British Novelist. She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London.

Ru Freeman is the author of A Disobedient Girl. She is an activist and journalist whose work appears internationally. She calls both Sri Lanka and America home.

Victoria Brittain, currently a Research Associate at the London School of Economics, has lives and worked as a journalist in Washington, Saigon, Algiers, Nairobi, and London. She worked at 'The Guardian' for 20 years, most recently as Associate Foreign Editor.

Rachel Holmes is the author of Eleanor Marx: A Life, The Secret Life of Dr James Barry and The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. She is co-editor of Fifty Shades of Feminism and I Call Myself A Feminist. She lives in London.