Reimagining Palestine

Omar Robert Hamilton (Moderator)

Omar Robert Hamilton is an author, editor, and co-founder of the Palestine Festival of Literature. Established in 2008, PalFest – as it is known – takes international authors to Palestine where they stage free, public events with their Palestinian counterparts in cities across the West Bank and ’48. Each day the guests travel to a different city where they meet activists, artists and scholars by day, and stage their events at night. International guests will typically visit Hebron, Jerusalem, Nablus, Lydd, Bethlehem and Haifa. In 2012 the festival took place exclusively in Gaza, entering through Egypt in the one year the Muslim Brotherhood were in power. PalFest has taken over 100 international authors, editors, publishers and agents over twelve editions of the festival and published two major anthologies of the work produced as a result. Since October 7th PalFest has been producing major events internationally to raise cultural pressure against the genocide, assisting writers and publishers with ongoing engagements on Palestine, and helping Gazan writers reach new audiences however possible. 

Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie is Writer-in-Residence at GU-Q. She has written eight critically acclaimed novels, including Burnt Shadows, A God in Every Stone, and Home Fire which won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Four of her novels have won awards from Pakistan’s Academy of Letters.  In 2019, she was announced as the winner of the Nelly Sachs Award in Germany, but that prize was later rescinded because of her support for BDS. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature in the UK, and her novels have been translated into more than 30 languages.