Hammad

Anne Enright, Kate Grenville and Isabella Hammad are among the writers longlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction.Debut novelists make up half of the 16-strong longlist. Booker-shortlisted British author Chetna Maroo has made the list for her first novel Western Lane, which explores grief, sisterhood and sport, while American writer Maya Binyam was chosen for Hangman, about a man who returns to his unnamed home nation to find his dying brother.Quick GuideWomen's prize for fiction longlist 2024ShowHangman by Maya…

Sally Rooney: In the middle of November, as the catastrophe in Gaza intensified, I was asked to take part in a public event with the British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad. We were invited to discuss our work as novelists, and the role of writers and artists generally, in the context of current events. I was unable to travel at the time, but I suggested that we might conduct a conversation over email instead, with the intention of publishing our exchange.In both her novels and her nonfiction – such as her recent…

Isabella Hammad’s 2019 debut novel, The Parisian, was roundly praised for its scale and humanity and won the Betty Trask prize. On the face of it, her second novel contrasts strongly with her first. The Parisian is a historical epic with a questing, romantic male protagonist; Enter Ghost is set in the modern day, and focuses on Sonia Nasir, a 35-year-old actor, who is arguably in stasis. Yet Hammad’s second novel is unmistakably the first book’s direct descendant: a story of Palestine, driven by questions of identity and…

Isabella Hammad impressed with her debut novel, The Parisian. The story of a Palestinian man navigating upheaval at home and abroad during the first half of the 20th century, its marriage of the personal and the political was notably assured for a twentysomething writer.Now, four years later, she’s done it again – and what context could offer a more febrile union of the personal and the political than present-day Palestine? Enter Ghost takes you deep inside the protagonist’s experience while opening a wider window on to…