KATAYOUN SHAHANDEH surveys Iran’s cultural heritage and explains what has been damaged and what could be lost
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‘This is as balanced a story as you can find’
Playwright ISMAEL KHALIDI talks to Joe Gill about how his theatre adaptation of the famous Palestinian novella Returning to Haifa was axed in New York, then found a home in London
Returning to Haifa
[Scott Rylander]
A dazzling novel, and autobiographical fiction, by Mexicans Brenda Navarro and Cristina Rivera Garza, and poetry by Brazilian Ricardo Domeneck
JONATHAN TAYLOR ponders the difference between autobiography and memoir - between life and story - in Margaret Atwood’s account of herself
Rereleases from Andrew Gold; John McFee, Stu Cook, Keith Knudsen; and The Outer Limits
Five years ago a flash crowd of Glaswegian activists defeated the Home Office and the police; MATT KERR urges you to savour that day in a cinema
SYLVIA HIKINS celebrates the chance that a new memoir offers to explore Frieda Brewster’s remarkable life story
BEFORE his assassination in Beirut in 1972 by the Israeli secret service Mossad, Ghassan Kanafani was one of the greatest Palestinian writers and political activists of his generation. His novella Returning to Haifa was highly influential in the aftermath of the 1967 war, when Israel seized east Jerusalem and the West Bank, which it holds to this day.
Ismael Khalidi
Kanafani got the inspiration for the book when his cousin and her husband crossed into Palestine after the June war in 1967. There they were told stories about how during the zionist attacks on Palestinian cities and villages, many families forced to leave their homes got separated during the Nakbah (“catastrophe”) in 1948 during a war in which 700,000 fled or were expelled from their homes.
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Ben Cowles speaks with IAN ‘TREE’ ROBINSON and ANDY DAVIES, two of the string pullers behind the Manchester Punk Festival, ahead of its 10th year show later this month
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
JESSICA WIDNER explores how the twin themes of violence and love run through the novels of South Korean Nobel prize-winner Han Kang
In an exhibition of the graphic art of Lorna Miller, MATT KERR takes a lungful of the oxygen of dissent