susan abulhawa — Every Moment Is a Life
Bestselling author presents a bilingual anthology of essays by Palestinian writers documenting life during conflict, in conversation with Laila Al-Arian.
Why we picked this
This anthology gives voice to Palestinian writers documenting their own experience in real time — the kind of primary-source testimony that history will treat as essential, presented by one of the most widely-read Palestinian novelists in the world.
Susan abulhawa is the author of “Mornings in Jenin,” one of the most widely translated Palestinian novels ever published, and has spent two decades making Palestinian narrative legible to readers who had never encountered it directly. “Every Moment Is a Life” is a different kind of project: an anthology, bilingual in Arabic and English, gathering essays from Palestinian writers who have been documenting life under siege in real time. The collection does not attempt synthesis or argument — it accumulates testimony.
The writers in the anthology are journalists, poets, academics, and civilians, each writing from within circumstances that resist the clinical language of foreign policy analysis. What abulhawa has assembled is a record made from the inside — a form of documentation whose value compounds as distance from events grows and as official accounts harden into received history. The bilingual structure matters too, preserving the original Arabic alongside translation rather than treating the English version as definitive.
In conversation with Laila Al-Arian, a journalist whose own reporting has covered Palestine extensively, abulhawa will discuss both the editorial process behind the anthology and the larger question of what literature can do in moments when events are still unfolding. The event is free and open to the public at Politics and Prose, Washington’s long-running independent bookstore.