Selma Dabbagh
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction based in London. Her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies including those published by Granta and the British Council. She was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Award 2005 and has won and been nominated for various international short story awards.
Her first novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, December 2011) that follows the lives of the children of the former exiled leadership who returned to Gaza with the peace deals of the 1990s was recently published to widespread acclaim and reviewed positively by The Independent, the Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror, the Times Literary Supplement as well as other British and Middle Eastern newspapers with The Times describing it as “A punchy first novel… beautifully observed… the plot races and the voices are strong.” Dabbagh has lived in various Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the West Bank. She has recently been working on the script and dialogue for a fiction feature film by the Director Azza el Hassan.
سلمى الدباغ: كاتبة فلسطينية- بريطانية تعيش في لندن. نشرت قصصها القصيرة في عدد من الكتب ورشحت لجائزة "International PEN David TK Wong"وجائزة "Pushcart" .
نشرت قصصها القصيرة ضمن مختارات قصصية صدرت عن مجموعة Granta «جرانتا» و International PEN «منظمة القلم الدولية». تعد «خارج غزة» روايتها الأولى.
“He could never go back to that place, it had been sealed off to him for ever, blown to the sky with explosives then flattened to the ground with bulldozers, built over with tarmac, lived on top of by other people.”
“Nothing you do for them will harm the enemy, the real enemy, it will only draw in more support for them as a party.”
“All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another.”
“To hell with memory. It was like feeling around in basket of apples only to be confronted by a snake.”
“Soldier on guard says they've identified “someone on two legs a hundred metres from the outpost”. The other soldier, in the lookout, says “A girl about ten,” but by then they're already shooting. Girl's dead[...]The point is this use of code, on two legs, denoting human. It reminded me of that speech by their Prime Minister saying that we were beasts walking on two legs [...]The idea that having legs makes you human. I thought of adding a Primo Levi-ish dimension to it. Merging this two-legged idea with a sort of general question about what is a man, you know, linking it to “if this is a man who labours in the mud/ who knows no peace/ who fights for a crust of bread?” [...] my thesis being that the occupation, the closures, the siege have made amputees of all of us, crawling around in the mud. Legless in Gaza. The lot of us.”
“We can't just run away. It's our land. Our people. We have a duty.”