Real Lives
Reem Ghanayem gathered eighteen Gazan writers' wills into one book
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Reem Ghanayem has spent fifteen years carrying other people's voices into Arabic. This month a book she carried the other way — out of Gaza and into English — reached the longlist of the Palestine Book Awards.
"Book of Wills," published by Akoya, is 112 pages and eighteen writers. Each of them wrote a last will and testament in Gaza. Several have been killed since. The collection opens the way the reader might expect and closes the way the reader does not: with the writers alive on the page, naming what they loved.
Among the pieces is Refaat Alareer's "If I Must Die," the poem the professor of world literature at the Islamic University of Gaza left behind, and which has since been read aloud in more languages than he lived to count.
Ghanayem set out her reason for the book in one sentence.
"To write a will under siege is not surrender — it's defiance. It says: I existed. I felt. I belonged. I am not yours to erase."
Reem Ghanayem, compiler of "Book of Wills"
The volume carries forewords by Judith Butler and by Alberto Manguel, the Argentine-Canadian writer whose own work Ghanayem had translated into Arabic two years earlier.
The workshop#
Ghanayem was born on 19 May 1982 in Jaljulia, one of the Triangle towns inside the Green Line, and her English-language literary profiles place her in Baqa al-Gharbiyye. She took bachelor's degrees in both English and Arabic literature, a master's on the grotesque, and a doctorate in dramatic literature at the University of Haifa.
Her subject was the theatre of the absurd, and she stayed with it: her study "The Theatre of the Absurd Between Rise and Decline" was published in 2024, two decades after she first started reading Beckett in two languages at once.
The translations are the spine of the career. James Joyce's poems came into Arabic in 2013. Then Charles Bukowski — "Post Office" in 2014, the stories of "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town" in 2015 — and in the same period "Death in a Free Land," her anthology of African American poetry.
William Burroughs followed: "Junky" in 2017, "Naked Lunch" in 2019. Between them, in 2018, she published all 817 haiku Richard Wright wrote in the last months of his life, a book most English readers have never opened.
That is an unusual list for an Arabic translator, and it is a deliberate one. The writers she chose are the ones who wrote from the underside of the American century — the post office clerk, the addict, the Black poet counting syllables in exile — and she brought them to Arabic readers as literature rather than as sociology.
Her own lines#
She is a poet before she is anything else. "Mag: A Biography of Exiles" appeared from Dar al-Jamal in Beirut in 2011, "Prophecies" in 2015, and "Either / Or: The Alternative Poems" from Dar Raya in Palestine in 2023.
She has also worked as an editor on Arabic literary sites and runs the Arabic-to-English translation strand of the Short Story Project, which is to say she has spent her professional life on both sides of the same door.
The 2026 Palestine Book Awards, run for the fifteenth year by Middle East Monitor, announced fifteen longlisted titles on 21 August. A shortlist follows, and the winners are named at the ceremony in November.
Whatever the judges decide, the eighteen writers of "Book of Wills" have their sentence in print, in a second language, in a book a woman from the Triangle assembled for them. That was the assignment. It is finished.
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