Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a novel, and a play, The Narrow Sea, which was honored at the 1994 Cairo Festival. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. Samuel Wilder is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.

"A poignant piece of autofiction. . . It addresses the constricted past and present of Palestinian life in Area C of the West Bank, with its omnipresent permits and checkpoints, through storylines that channel the ghosts of Zaqtan’s family, friends, and lovers, acknowledged at the beginning of the novel as the narrator is walking in the 'valley of the shadow of death,' in the wadi on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho."

Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a novel, and a play, The Narrow Sea, which was honored at the 1994 Cairo Festival. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. Samuel Wilder is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.

"A poignant piece of autofiction. . . It addresses the constricted past and present of Palestinian life in Area C of the West Bank, with its omnipresent permits and checkpoints, through storylines that channel the ghosts of Zaqtan’s family, friends, and lovers, acknowledged at the beginning of the novel as the narrator is walking in the 'valley of the shadow of death,' in the wadi on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho."

Ghassan Zaqtan is the author of numerous collections of poetry, a novel, and a play, The Narrow Sea, which was honored at the 1994 Cairo Festival. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. Samuel Wilder is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.

"A poignant piece of autofiction. . . It addresses the constricted past and present of Palestinian life in Area C of the West Bank, with its omnipresent permits and checkpoints, through storylines that channel the ghosts of Zaqtan’s family, friends, and lovers, acknowledged at the beginning of the novel as the narrator is walking in the 'valley of the shadow of death,' in the wadi on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho."