The Palestinian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is one of the world's great national literatures of catastrophe. The 1948 Nakba expelled some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes; the 1967 Naksa added more displacements and brought the rest of historic Palestine under Israeli military control. The literature has shaped itself around those facts.
Ghassan Kanafani made the Palestinian short story the form in which the early refugee experience was processed — most starkly in Men in the Sun. Mahmoud Darwish made the lyric the voice of Palestinian collective consciousness. Sahar Khalifeh wrote the novel of life under occupation in the West Bank. Elias Khoury — Lebanese, but writing the history of the camps — produced in Gate of the Sun the most ambitious Palestinian novel of the late twentieth century.
The contemporary diaspora generation — Susan Abulhawa, Hala Alyan, Adania Shibli, Hisham Matar — writes increasingly in English, but the centre of the tradition remains Arabic, and the most important Palestinian publishing initiative of the last decade has been the slow building-out of Palestinian literature in translation across European and Asian languages.
