Your Presence Is A Danger To Your Life (Paperback)

Description

In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met withhundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences ofthat day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed.

From these encounterscomes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection oftwenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five,whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered asone of the most savage military offensives of our time.

Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before abombing, the books title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans.That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable losshomesshattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliteratedand mechanisms of crueltythat defy comprehension.

In gathering thesetestimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, andthe survivors determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.

About the Author

Samar Yazbek, born in 1970, is a Syrian writer andjournalist. A prominent advocate for human and womens rights, she took part inthe 2011 popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exilesoon after. She was named one of the Beirut39 most promising authors under theage of forty in 2010 and was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize International Writerof Courage Award in 2012, followed by the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the DutchOxfam/PEN Prize. In 2022, she was selected as one of twelve International Writersby the Royal Society of Literature. Yazbek has published two collections ofshort stories, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and hasbeen translated into over twenty languages.

Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator ofcontemporary Arabic fiction. She has been a Finalist for the National BookAward for Translated Literature three times: in 2024 for her translation ofSamar Yazbeks Where the Wind Calls Home; in 2021 for hertranslation of Samar Yazbeks Planet of Clay; and in 2019 forKhaled Khalifas Death is Hard Work, which also won the 2020 SaifGhobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.