 Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us for today's event. My name is Daniel Lowe and I am the curator of the Arabic collections of the British Library. We are happy again to host the Seif Khubash Banipal Prize lecture this year given by a well-known Palestinian novelist short story writer and film director Liana Badr. This event is in association with the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. The event will be in two parts. In the first you can hear Liana's lecture. In the second she is joined by journalist and literary translator Samira Qua for a conversation and to take your questions. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. You are able to watch the lecture in either Arabic or English. You can decide by clicking on the tab below the video. If you have any questions during the event you can submit them using the question box below. A selection of questions will be presented in Liana during the second half of the event. You can use the menu above provide feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library. The British Library is a charity. Your support helps us open up a world of knowledge and information for everyone. You will also find a link to the bookshop where you can find relevant books. You will find social media links below the video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. Now without further ado we will turn over to Samira for the rest of the event. Good evening. On behalf of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature I'd like to welcome you to our fifth annual lecture hosted by the British Library. The Trust was set up in September 2004 by the publisher of Banipal Magazine to support and celebrate the publication of Arab authors in English translation. It aims to contribute to deepening and enriching cultural dialogue between the Arab world and the West particularly Europe and North America. To that end it works to bring the literature of contemporary Arab authors to the UK and to English speakers worldwide. The Trust views such intercultural dialogue and exchange as a means of giving Western audiences a glimpse of contemporary Arab culture in all its diversity and vibrancy. The Trust works to fulfill its aims by supporting and promoting the translation of literary works by contemporary Arab authors into English. It also supports the publication of Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature in English translation three times a year. Our annual translation prize known as the Saif Ghubash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation was set up in 2006 and is made possible by a generous grant from Omar Saif Ghubash and his family in memory of his late father Saif Ghubash. The annual lecture also supported by Omar Saif Ghubash and his family was set up to celebrate the 10th yearly award of the prize and can focus on any aspect of Arabic literature and translation. The inaugural lecture by Anton Shamas, poet and professor of Arabic literature at the University of Michigan, was hosted by the British Library in London on the 14th of October 2016. Historian and scholar Robert Irwin delivered the 2017 lecture and poet, philosopher and author Adonis gave the 2018 lecture. Last year's lecture was delivered by novelist Hanan Shikh. This evening's lecture is being given by the well known Palestinian novelist short story writer and film director Liana Bedir. Liana was born in 1950 in Jerusalem and grew up between Jericho and Jerusalem which had a cosmopolitan atmosphere and was home to a cultured elite that celebrated the art of translation. After 1967 she lived in Amman Beirut Damascus and Tunis and returned to Palestine in 1994 with her husband. She's lived in Ramallah since her return. Liana studied at the University of Jordan in Amman and graduated from Beirut's Arab University with a bachelor's degree in philosophy and psychology. After returning to Palestine, she earned an MA from Beirut University. Her first novel, A Compass for the Sunflower, was published in 1979 and translated into English in 1989. Three of her other works have also been translated into English. A collection of novellas entitled A Balcony Over the Fakhani, The Stars of Jericho and a novel entitled The Eye of the Mirror which I had the pleasure of translating into English in 1994. Her novel, The White Tent was published in Arabic in 2016 and her latest novel is The Land of the Tortoise. In addition to her literary writing, Liana ran the cinema department at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah. She also edited the ministry's periodical, Deferter Taqafiyah. Liana has directed seven documentary films which have received several international awards and she's written several film scripts. It gives me great pleasure to welcome Liana on behalf of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature this evening to deliver our fifth annual lecture. She'll speak on the topic of creating a mosaic of literature. Hello everyone, creating a mosaic of literature. I reckon I fell in love with writing through being born and growing up in Jerusalem where I could look at every star and planet of the universe. The city seemed to its inhabitants and its visitors like the center of the world and it was always full of people of every country nationality and religion. My small family world was not confined to people we knew. A considerable part of it consisted of a search for pleasure with new visitors and tourists for whom this might be their last or only visit. My family had taught us that these human relationships were the most valuable thing we could possess when we shared our love and happiness with those who loved our city. It wasn't unusual to send last minute invitations to lunch or supper in our homes to the strangers or pilgrims, wandering around the street and alleyway, markets and camp. Many a time my father would stop his car to give a lift to a foreign tourist walking along the Jerusalem Jericho Road with his thumb outstretched as a sign that he was hitchhiking. I was born and fed myself on whatever was brought to me by that cosmopolitan city, a precious jewel for religions and perhaps for all the people of the earth or so its inhabitants believed. A popular proverb in our country says neighbor before house and that applied whatever religion or sect the neighbor belonged to, for the sacred city makes him an equal, a twin, a companion and a relative of all who live there. So as children we awoke like but growing in the shadow of difference making of it a real game to regulate our daily life. I opened my eyes to the Christmas tree as I awaited my present in the house of my neighbors and family friends and with the children discovered with shock and joy that it was their father the lawyer who was disguising himself by wearing a Santa clothes outfit unaware we had recognized him from the color of his bird and shape of his chin when his costume moved a bit and slipped off his neck. Even when I just appeared in exile for 27 years these children who had grown up with as my friends were here and this was not just confined to us the plates of sweets that the Christian Arabs used to make for their festivals would find their way to the houses of their Muslim neighbors and vice versa. To this day Najwa the same family's daughter still sends a plate of sweets made of wheat seeds and fruit for Saint Barbara's Day to remind me that we are all united by the same affection in which we grew up playing singing and going to the cinema with a shared pleasure in running and playing in the streets of Jerusalem or the fields of Jericho that stretch across the valley. At school it was quite usual for girls to exchange with each other the chains and links that hold miniature copies of the Quran or Golden Crosses without any attention to religion or sex out of pure affection we would attend midnight mass in the Latin Church in Jericho with the full agreement of the family because shared festivals were the first symbol of the existence of the original Palestine as it was before the occupation which wanted to give to one party the legal right to control the city and wipe out the mosaic of people that guaranteed its diversity. We lived an intertwined life in Jerusalem like color threats in an embroidered and this also applied to Jericho where we exchanged conversation with Umnazir the Christian seamstress who lived with her daughter in the old hotel that Market Wayne stayed in when he visited Palestine. Then in Jericho we would follow the trips to the site of Christ's baptism and the Christian pilgrims and look at the icons drawn by passing travelers and all the local families would go up onto the roof of our house to observe the stars and planets through my father's telescope which he had taken six months to carve by hand. Even after 1994 when I returned from exile I could see those pictures colored with gold paint on the outer brick wall of that tiny house that my father occupied and which was once the only surgery in the town. In Palestine before the occupation religions were a source of kindness and harmony between people. It was the nuns who gave us music and piano lessons so it was not surprising that I should join a Jerusalem school that was keen for its girls to attend concerts of Western classical music presented by the Goethe Institute on a semi-regular basis. Nor was it strange that the Christmas celebrations at our school, the home of Dari Tufel, should be accompanied by popular Palestinian depke dances that I found in the streets of Jerusalem and gardens of Jericho. Not just the words of the east but the whole world. What does the literature consist of? It consists of this beautiful mosaic which brings together people, faces, places and nature. However much the shapes, colors and waves may differ as they appear from the outside. It was my good fortune that my upbringing in Jerusalem gave me a sense of diversity and the ability to look at difference as a great advantage. The best teacher to teach me Arabic of elementary level was a Palestinian from Jerusalem of Turkish origin and my wonderful English teacher was a Jerusalem woman from Al Hosseini family who volunteered to teach us English because she had plenty of time. She went to great trouble to teach us the art of appreciating poetry and especially those poems that she encouraged us to turn into a solo or group dramatic performance. When my mother didn't want me to go to see the film and God created women by the director Roger Vadim starring Brigitte Bardot, fearing that I would be affected by the nudity for which the film was not notorious, my elderly aunt encouraged her to give me the freedom to watch it even though I was only 10 or 11 years old. There was a Jerusalem elite that tried to look at the world from every angle. My mother and her sisters were graduates of the various foreign schools in Jerusalem which influenced the growth of a cultural atmosphere with very taste and perspective. Palestinian radio broadcast a program of foreign songs which was very popular and boys and girls would rush to listen to it and get together to repeat the songs. Jerusalem was like a meadow full of birds and flowers. There was never a hint of Panathasism, narrow-mindedness or hatred of the other that the occupation constructed and which left its effect effects later. Perhaps it was because of this diversity which creates literature that my life changed when I came across Margaret Mitchell's book God with the Wind translated into Arabic. I had already started to read novels by that time aged 11. Near my Jerusalem boarding school there was a cultural center with a library full of American and world literature. I acquired a special right to borrow four books at a time from this library while most people could only borrow two. This was because I was a fast reader and needed to change books frequently and the kind like Behran thought she might spare both me and her the trouble of my coming every day or two. It was the fascinating character of Scarlett O'Hara that made me so fond of novels for I discovered through gun with the wind which I read in full a thousand pages in two parts that it is people stories that make history and that it is these captivating characters who resemble us as we resemble them that make us look at events at people and at ourselves at the same time. For the first time I was reading about wars in other parts of the world before that I had thought that war was something made for us alone to sleep under the beds of the children orphaned in the scene who had been in terror streams of sweat pouring from our brows because the explosive sound was usually directly over the university. I asked myself at the time if the pilot realized what a hellish mission he was undertaking in terrorizing us just because we were sitting our exam. The experience of having my first novel translated brought me much pleasure because I got to know a lot of people specialists and lovers of novels and it influenced my future writing because I felt that I was writing for a world reader and not just for a local reader. I had become a citizen in the vast kingdom of literature. I also discovered that Edward Said had got the book accepted in the syllabus for comparative literature in the Middle East at a well-known American university. This made me more conscious of the role of translation in creating a field for universal mutual understanding through literature for it shapes our reading towards our shared horizon and trains us to read our differences and disagreements in a spirit of love and tolerance. The extent of the welcome received by the eye of the mirror translated into English by Shamira Kaur was a lovely surprise that was quite new to me. I had written this novel about the Palestinian presence in Lebanon. I spent several years researching in parallel the facts and the personal stories behind what happened. I gathered dozens of statements from people who had lived there and drew successive maps of tell the daughter under siege because I really wanted to make it a novel like an epic reflecting the difficult life of people in the camps during the long siege. I was aiming for something like Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and specifically I wanted to tell Palestinian history through the eyes of women. So I was surprised at the eagerness to read and teach the novel in a number of universities and its institutes in the world. Later I learned that the effort a writer devotes to his work will find a limitless appreciation anywhere in the world and not just in his homeland provided that he does all in his power to present literary experiences derived from real and inner life. However strange and unusual and remote from ordinary experience they may be. This increased both my patience and my appreciation of fine detailed work no matter how exhausting. So the novelist must sometimes endure moments of difficulty boredom and a lack of direct appreciation because writing does not heal its fruits at exactly the moment of production rather it matures slowly producing a sap that forms in a golden goblet such is the literature that he lifts up and presents to people. Every novel or short story of mine that has been translated has sketched out the new lines in my life and has alerted me to far reaching possibilities that I didn't know I could reach creating new dimensions of vision that I knew nothing about forming new friendships and other dimensions for me. Yes writing is the mosaic of life and the window through which we look out onto the world. When we go to the Palace of Hisham Ibn Abdul Malik the Omaya Khalifa in Jericho we see the largest mosaic floor in the world made up of 38 mosaic carpets interlooking with each other. Its total area is 826 square meters and it is made up of more than 6 million individual tiles used to decorate the floor of the reception hall called the Diwan. The Arabs were taught to benefit from the cultural achievement of all the peoples of the world who had preceded them just as European civilization benefited from their glorious achievement in many fields. This is the foundation of the mutual tolerance established by centuries of civilization in the area that has been considered the center of the ancient work. I imagine the ancient translator preparing the roads for the caravans that carried commercial goods and essential provisions for people in ancient times and I imagine the modern literary translator performing the same task loaded with love and affection and the desire for mutual understanding between people. He holds love and respect for the text in his hand as he persists in his search for the right word to shake the death matter from the meaning and blow the spirit of life into the text in another language to express the intention of the original author. How much agitation and worry he must endure to recreate the text to convey the wishes of the original writer. His skills and professionalism are what defines the depth of the true life that he gives to the text for a second time in another language. How much precision, creativity, stamina and competence are needed to recreate the text in another body in a completely different language while conveying the same meanings and enjoying the same sensibility. How much patience is needed to look into the soul of the writer to know what exactly he wanted to say with a precision free from any betrayal of meaning. It is a different type of creation of another kind. We can thank these linguistic explorers and convey to them our thanks and gratitude for recreating our text and thereby refreshing our lives in another language. This is the dimension that unites the translator with the writer and sets the two parties in a circle of need in an environment we cannot dispense with. I cannot express my thanks enough to the many people that have translated my stories and included them in anthologies in world languages that have allowed so many people to read and study them. In recent times the novel has changed acquiring a different dimension and the new reverberation that no one has experienced before. The cinema has reflected itself in writing so that it is no longer possible for us to resort to generalities and male key details. So my novels have become full of visual images like a camera picturing the gradation of colors and the inner structures of a scene registering the slightest movement of a muscle in the heart or body of the person I am writing about. This may also be connected to the visual film images that convey the stories we wish to tell clearly and plainly. Can we not now feel the heartbeat of early man when we see the hands and palms that he drew on his keyboard? Do we not see gentleness and happiness in his pictures of forces and bulls roaming in front of his cave? The mosaic floors in Hisham's palace show a picture of lions chasing gazelle to kill them as prey reminding us of an eternal truth which we are continually confronted by namely that in our lives today there are wild beasts who never cease to persecute, murder, repress, confiscate other people's land and appropriate what does not belong to them. This fact in itself should restore our faith in the power of the mind the heart and the spirit to resist so that we may bring mankind out of the circle of barbarity. Novels are simply pictures that we draw in order to escape the results of the constant destructive battles that are unjustly waged against humanity and we writers who through our simple or complex words are constantly dreaming of another future for mankind are supported by legends of translators who undertake to convey our texts into other languages or relay other works to us. I remember one evening when I was writing a long essay about peace. I was in the year of my secondary school diploma taking part in a competition arranged by a world association for young people and students about peace in the Middle East. As I was writing I quoted some paragraphs translated from a lecture by Immanuel Kant about a project for an enduring and comprehensive world peace written and published in 1795. My father stayed up with me until dawn so that I could finish it properly and he was typing it on his typewriter. Then I learned that my essay had won first prize and that a celebration was being arranged for the winners. During the days that followed this happy announcement of the winner however the war of aggression broke out and the West Bank was occupied. The result being not just the cancellation of the celebration but also my family having to shuttle between different countries and my becoming a permanent exile. This happened in 1967. Our family was dispersed in exile to various places and my father died in Amman far from his homeland. Some of my sisters were unable to return and remained abroad. I now live far from entering Jerusalem where my extended family lived because a permanent blockade prevents us residents of the West Bank and gets that from traveling with military roadblocks and the racist partition world. Doesn't it deserve a mention that what literature and its translators are trying to achieve is being wiped out and undermined by weapons in order to create arrest, detention, imprisonment and division between people? So far mankind has not devised a more effective weapon to close these ghettos in whose shadows we are made to live but as writers we shall use writing literature novels and short stories to go on with what we were made for because there is an unbreakable spiritual connection between the reader and the writer and a spiritual bond between the writer and the translator for literature will remain a celebration of life and humanity. Writing is the language of the heart when it is distributed to all. Yes, writing is a project for building the world somehow and for repairing it. If it is broken and shattered in my latest novel Land of the Tortoise I recounted a love story of a well-known Palestinian woman poet who tries to recapture the meaning of love in a world which is all walls and barriers in parallel with the writer's return to Palestine after 27 years. What is the past like and what is the present? Is there efficient for the future? This is what the novel attempts to discuss. Writing is a hard instrument but it is a means of raising morale. It is the only thing that can save us from repression. It is a conversation of the self and the other. It is a writer's constant attempt to create a new time in which his translators male or female can share together with lovers of blissful dreams like them. I conclude by thanking Margaret Obank who spent time discussing her ideas on writing with me, the translator Cameron Horsch who had a valuable conversation with me about the mysterious methods of translation and also Paul Starkey who translated this lecture. Sincere thanks also to the noble organization and staff of Bani Bal who worked tirelessly to make Arab literature known in Britain and beyond. Thank you. Liana, thank you very much. That was absolutely fascinating. We are now taking questions from the audience. Please feel free to send us your questions through the question function on Zoom. I actually have a question from Becky Maddox who runs the Bani Bal book club and she says last week we discussed Liana's novel The Eye of the Mirror. We found it a powerful book. Thank you. And she asks you, she wonders if you could say something about the significance of the mirror of the title in the work itself. And who did you imagine would be in the audience when you wrote this work? I think that the mirror is something spiritual because when I was young my mother always told, was told don't look to the mirror because maybe you can be crazy. You can be mad if you look all the time to the mirror. And I think that in our culture it means the dimensions of the soul. That's why people are very afraid to see. And I looked to the history of my people and I found that the massacres which we have between time to time, it was something to make you crazy. Why we should have all these wars, all the occupation, all the suffering, everything bad around us. So I thought that if you look to your soul, if you look to the world, sometimes you can get crazy unless you can try to analyze what is going around. For the audience I think that when I write I don't think what I can do just to write, just to express the character, the situation. So that's why I I can see myself just like a mirror which is reflecting all the emotions, the looks, the feelings, the senses, the smells, the colors. That's it. Okay, thank you. And another question I have here is that you say you were influenced by having your first novel translated and that after that you felt you were writing for a world audience. How did that change the way that you write? Actually, I felt that my first novel was like just to talk with a very close friend. I was trying to build a world of characters, a world of nostalgia. And I felt the deep emotions I couldn't express. So I tried to find these characters to express these deep emotions. And it was something very inside myself. But when my first novel was translated, I felt that I should face the whole world because now I feel this belonging to everybody around me. And suddenly I became very interested to read in English all the world literature. And I felt that it was more sensible to know a lot of things around the world because by the time I feel this belonging to every country, to every writer, to every man and woman, this is the impact of the translation. It changed me from inside. It doesn't relate to a small, you know, these small feelings or or this point or late, it become like an ocean for me, the writing. Okay, and I have another question here for you. Commentators often consider your work in view of the fact that you are both Palestinian and a woman. How do you feel about the importance of these labels in relation to your work? Are these elements of your identity something you're keen to portray? Yes, I feel that there is a big difference in these two points because it's very, very important to write as a woman, breaking the silence which all my ancestors, all my grandmothers have before and they were kept the all the grandmothers, all the old people, women, old generations, they were talking to each other. They didn't talk to the world. It was something limited inside. It was something like you put it in a box, but when you write now, I feel that it explodes these secrets, like I have a shell and I'm breaking it. I look inside. It's just not to keep the things for myself or for my woman society. And on the contrary, I feel I don't feel that this is also easy because sometimes or many times I feel the rejection of the society around me. I feel that people couldn't accept this. Everyone can't accept that somebody is criticizing all the time that I have this look to talk about things. Sometimes it is unspoken. Nobody likes to talk about. So I don't feel safe inside, but I feel that I should have the courage to break the silence all the time. So it's something in contrast with each other. We have a question here from Sohail Tarek Khan. He says, Dear Madam, thank you for the interesting lecture. You mentioned the Jerusalem elite. Is there any so-called cultural elite in Palestine or in the Arab world? Who are they? Where? He wants to know which country or city. Does the hub of Arabian culture lie in the modern Arabic spoken world, according to you? And then he wants to know if he can have a copy of your lecture, which I think the British Library is going to put on its website subsequently. So you would be able to watch it. But over to you, Liana, for your answer. I guess, sure. There is this elite in our country. And we were raised by this elite. And I knew that the generation before us, many generations, they knew many languages. As an example, my grandfather, he went to the university in Asitana, which is Istanbul now. Many of our people around, they have books, they were making lectures, they were translation. They have translated many things. It's very well known that, as I mentioned in the lecture about Khalid al-Sakakini, about Isha'at al-Nashashibi, about Musa al-Ishaq al-Hussaini, about Najat al-Sidqi. We have a lot of people who were very distinguished, like Kilsum Odeh, who was the first translator to Arabic literature in Russia in the 19th century. So it's something for whom he is asking. They should get back to the history and they can. Thank you. And I have another question for you here. How does your work as a writer and your work as a filmmaker feed into and complement one another? Yes, it is like a threat or it's like something related to each other, two parallel roads. But every road has its own language. You can't write like cinema, you can't film a film or make a camera like a book. But anyway, if you have this passion to connect these two parallel roads, you can have the benefits of each. The cinema taught me how to look to small details, how to have a close look for everything around me, beginning from the colors, to the nature, to the emotions, to the people, conflicts, to the changing in the weather and the changing in the body. You know, if you can make them work with each other, they are like a twin and they can make a new concept to each other. Maybe this has to, we have a lot of theories about this, but for myself, I felt that I can try and this I can see everything color, everything in colors, in details, all the small emotions, all the small passion that is and the cinema is a modern, modern art and it is unique in its, because it is consisted of literature, paintings, colors, music. So I tried to reflect this also in my writing, not to be traditional, not to have a straight look on everything, just to try to invent my own style between all these things from here and from the other part. Yeah, having translated the eye of the mirror, I can attest to the fact that your writing is very visual, it has a very visual feel to it and it conjures up images to the reader and obviously the translator as well. If I might allow myself a question here, when you wrote that and your other works, were you ever thinking that perhaps they might be turned into films? Yes, I was thinking that it might be a film because writing is sharing, when you are writing, when you are inside the writing process in the subconscious, you are thinking of other people you like to share you what you are seeing or what you are reflecting and to see your senses, your judgment for things, your passions, your sadness, your happiness. So I tried to share this with the reader by making it through my eyes and through also the cinematic way reflecting, it's like many reflections, many colors at the same time, not just taking this traditional or this old styles just to look in a very straight line. Okay, thank you and I have here a question for Marianne Dagibos, I hope I'm not mispronouncing your name and she says, is there according to you a connection between literature and activism and if there is, how is it expressed in your work? I don't make an effort, a real effort to have this scene or a very clear scene because when I write it means that I am separate from everything, writing itself is a kind of activist act. So when I am writing, I don't think the purpose is or I don't think the reasons or the results of the writing, I just try to feel honest to express things as it is I try not to escape from the, you know, there's always these punishments you feel that if you write this, somebody will be angry, if you write this, nobody will accept you. So I try to be free, to free myself from all these bondages and try just to write. So I don't think about activism or about anything else, just to be honest and to write what I feel. And I have a question here from Iman Binani, she says, hello, many thanks to Liana Badar and the organizers. My question is, in what ways do you think your writing intersects with meets and diverges from writings by Arab women today, whether those who write in Arabic or in translation? Yes, I feel that it's really a very difficult, it's a difficult role to be a woman writer because you should not be accepting what is really, what is really accepted from everybody. You know, I am an Arabic woman, I am living in a very traditional society. So they think that you have borders, you shouldn't go here or talk about this or not talk about the other. So I try to break this line and to go through it to express what is hidden, what is not talking about the unspoken thing. And it costs the writer, it costs you a lot of things. Maybe it's not time to have more details, what is the cost of this, but it is really very difficult and it's not easy to make this rebel action and to talk about what is going on because it is like a game and all the society is accepting this game. So when you come to break it, it's not something easy. Okay, and there's a question here from Paul and he says, what advice would you give to young Arab writers starting out today? Just to be humble because everybody now, you know, the sometimes or maybe now writing becomes like a hobby for everybody, especially with the Facebook and with the social, you know, networks. So I think everybody thinks that he is Hemingway or maybe Marcel Bruce or somebody or anybody else. So if you feel yourself and you are humble, you can write. But if you think all the time that you are a very great writer before you begin, this is a problem. And this is the problem of the network, the social networks now, which is very widespread everywhere. Right, so just out of interest, would you, for example, be happy to do a blog or yourself write on social media or is that something you don't think that a serious writer should indulge in? You know, social network is very good to make communication between people, sometimes to read a small piece or to discuss ideas or things. But it's not the real field to work. The real field to work. It's like a work. You should have a lot of readings. You should have a lot of hard work. You should do your homework. So not just to show off everywhere or to just to put these phrases for yourself or for your friends or just talking big talk about the culture, about what is going around. This is the problem now within you writers. Not all of them, but mostly. We have a question here from Hanan and she says, what are the Arab novels and authors you would recommend translating urgently, obviously, into English or maybe other languages as well? I don't know. Yes, you know, there is a lot of Arabic writers, Arabic authors who they should be translated to English. In Iraq, there is a lot of writers like Zuhir Jazakiri in Qajaji Ahmed Saadawi. There is a lot of people everywhere. There is also writers in North Africa, in Tunisia, in Alger, in Morocco. Maybe there is a short or long list of people who they should be translated. We can get back to the booker prices or the other prices and see a lot of new names with a lot of new books that should be translated to English. Maybe we should have another talk about this because it's something very rich and multiple effects everywhere. Right and we're drawing to almost to the close now, so I think this is probably going to be our last question and it's from Hassan Abdul Razzaq and he asks, do you read Israeli authors? Who is your favorite? Growing up in Jerusalem, did you have Jewish friends? No, I was, I grew up in Jerusalem before the 67 war and I was exiled after that. I became a refugee by force because it happened that the same day I was in Amman and they didn't allow me the Israeli occupation to get back to my country. It was just 60 kilos between Jericho and Amman and it was the same country at that time Jordan and when the war happened in two or three days they just forbid everybody to get back. They didn't allow us or give us the permission many, many years, more than 26 years, 27 years to get back. So I don't know but I read a lot of Israeli literature because I was trying to see how they can deal with the Palestinian subject and I read mostly to Amos Oz and to A.B. Yehoshuba and Sami who who wrote Victoria by just the other name and I read for for many, many of them and I was amazed because they were writing as if there were no Palestinian at all in the world. I didn't find a Palestinian hero even when there were a Palestinian hero by chance it happened like the book The Lover for A.B. Yehoshuba it comes suddenly and the author get rid of the of this hero who is the lover the small or the little lover in the story. So I don't know why they try to what is the matter how they can feel that they are just living in a bubble but in general the Israelis now live in a bubble because they don't know what is going on behind this separation war and they live in another paradise while the occupied people they are living in in fire or the fire land or the other you know you know in suffering or that or this so I think we seem to have lost Liana Liana are you still with us? Yes yes it happened I don't know something happens with the mobile right okay so did you did you have anything to add to that answer? No I said I tried to read and I read a lot but my wish my inside wish is to find maybe more sensitivity to the Palestinian issue Yeah because we are the original people of the land Yeah right so basically you found no no recognition of the other in any Israeli literature that you read and the other being the Palestinian. Yes right till now at least but it's it's not the same for the other Israeli writers not in the novels in the novel field I like Shlomo Zem as an example I like Ilan Pappin there's a lot of research there is a lot of research book of the political books I like very much but in the novels it was like a bubble everybody is writing about just as if he is living in another world. Yeah yeah so you found that some Israeli analysts and perhaps revisionist historians and so forth were more aware of Palestinians. Yes I think we've probably come to the end of this very interesting evening and Liana thank you very very much for giving us such an interesting lecture and sharing your ideas with us the Bamipal Trust would also like to thank the British Library for hosting this event and Omar Saif Wabash and his family for sponsoring it and last but not least many thanks to our audience for participating we hope you've enjoyed this event and we look forward to your participation in future events thank you thank you very much for everybody thank you