Join us in London for the launch of two important, powerful, painful anthologies of writing and testimony from Gaza.
In Your Presence is a Danger to Your Life, Syrian writer Samar Yazbek has collected first-person testimonies of survivors of the genocide in Palestine, spending several months with them after their evacuation from Gaza. Through their individual stories, the patterns and structures of the ongoing Israeli genocide are revealed, and human consciousness and experience intervene in a discourse that is often dominated by abstraction, ideology, and news jargon.
The book is beautifully translated from Arabic by Leri Price, who will join Yazbek in conversation alongside Sondos Sabra, Palestinian writer and contributor to Voices of Resistance: Diaries of a Genocide, a collection of four women's accounts of survival.
The event will include readings and a discussion about testimony, writing from within an overwhelming moment, and translation. Moderated by writer and PalFest organiser Yasmin El-Rifae.
Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.
Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. She was born in 1970 and studied Arabic literature at Latakia University. Yazbek has been a prominent advocate for human rights and more specifically women’s rights in Syria. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 by Beirut39, organised by the Hay Festival. In 2012, she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize ‘International writer of courage’ for her book In the Crossfire, and received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize the following year. In 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of twelve International Writers. Yazbek has published two short story collections, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
Sondos Sabra is a writer and translator with a bachelor's degree in English Literature from the Islamic University of Gaza, where she studied under the poet Dr Refaat Alareer, who was murdered in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. Sondos is a co-author of Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide. In December 2023, three of her nieces and nephews were murdered by an Israeli rocket. Sondos is a founding member of the Shaghaf Youth Initiative, where discussions on texts and literary works are organised. Her journalism has appeared in The New Statesman and The Guardian. She left Gaza in late 2025 and is studying for an MA in the UK.
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2024, 2021, and 2019. Her translation of Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
Yasmin El-Rifae is a writer, editor, and coorganizer of The Palestine Festival of Literature. She is the author of Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution (Verso, 2022) and her essays and criticism have recently appeared in The Journal of Palestine Studies and The New York Review of Books. She is a contributing editor to Parapraxis and Lux magazines. Yasmin studies psychoanalytic theory at Birkbeck, University of London.