STONES

During the intifada we used to take little pieces of Palestine and throw them at the Israeli soldiers and they would run away, and I’ve wondered since I was a child why they ran away when we threw pieces of the Promised Land at them!

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from I Have Brought You a Severed Hand–published by Action Books

Buy it here

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Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet, born in Damascus in 1979. In 2008 he moved to Sweden. He has published five volumes of poetry in Arabic, most recently I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2024), and his poems have been translated into more than thirty languages. He also makes poetry films, such as Évian, which won the Zebra Award for Best Poetry Film in 2020. Almadhoun has collaborated with several poets and artists, including US artist Jenny Holzer and German musician Blixa Bargeld. His collection Adrenalin (translated into English by Catherine Cobham) was published by Action Books in the US in 2017. Almadhoun was recently awarded a one-year residency in the DAAD Artists-in- Berlin program and now divides his time between Berlin and Stockholm.

Catherine Cobham taught Arabic language and literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, for many years and was head of the department of Arabic and Persian from 2011 until 2021. She has translated the work of a number of Arab writers, including poetry by Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghayath Almadhoun, Tammam Hunaidy and Nouri al-Jarrah, and novels and short stories by Yusuf Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, Hanan al-Shaykh, Fuad al-Takarli and Jamal Saeed. She has written articles in academic journals and co-written with Fabio Caiani The Iraqi Novel: Key Writers, Key Texts (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).