Pre-fair Program // Beneath the Rubble, the Soil: Poetics of Defiance

Conversation with writers and publishers from Gaza.

As Gaza became unspeakable, a whisper buried under layers of denialism, censorship, oblivion, disavowing the erasure of an entire people as the world looks on, we turn to poets as truth-tellers. Amid death, terror, famine, and the collapse of existence in all its forms, they rise to scream at us, seeking to rescue what remains of our humanity. They come to voice, crying out from under the rubble. They write, enduring pain, despair, loss, sickness, trauma, perpetual displacement; they write from tents, collapsed homes, destroyed streets, dried fields, deprived hospitals, improvised classrooms. They write for survival, despite the world abandoning them. They had to burn their books to make a fire, they write. They buried their beloved ones, they write, they edit, they curate series, continuing to nourish an ecology of publications rooted in resistance. Through their wills, diaries, and testimonies, we are invited to hold their lives, stolen from them, and bear witness.

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MAHMOUD M. B. AL SHAER is the founder and director of 28 Magazine and 28 Gallery, an art and culture center in Gaza. In 2025, he co-edited “Letters from Gaza: A Collection Unveiling Emotions,” published by Penguin Random House SEA, and was one of the contributors to the collective project of ArabLit Quarterly’s “Gaza Gaza Gaza” (spring 2024). He has also been curator for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Palestine, and for the Goethe-Institute in Ramallah, for which he curated projects and was a jury member for the Short Story Writing Project in Arabic. He received many awards, including the Award for Excellence in the Cultural Sector – Late Naim Abdel Hadi Award: We will be one day what we want – Palestine, and from the A M Qattan Foundation: Culture and Arts Program – “Culture, Arts and Community Engagement.” He was part of the editorial team of the New Alphabet School, at HKW (Berlin), and co-curated the last session of the project dedicated to commoning.

MOHAMMAD AL-ZAQZOUQ is a well-known Palestinian writer, researcher, and editor who has published poetry, children’s books, and critical essays in regional and international platforms; a member of the Palestinian Writers’ Union, a co-founder of 28 Magazine and 28 Gallery. His work explores literature, culture, and resilience, and he contributes regularly to publications such as The New York Review of Books and Rummam. His writing appears on various Palestinian and Arabic platforms. He was the general coordinator of the Cultural Forum for Knowledge: “Utopia” (2015–2018). He was the guest editor of the issue “Hope Born Out of Despair,” a joint issue between 28 Magazine and Pen/Opp (Freedom of Expression, Literature and Culture), an international online magazine founded by Swedish PEN. He was also the co-editor of the latest issue of ArabLit Quarterly (spring 2024). In 2022, he participated in the New Alphabet School in Berlin at HKW. He writes for various publications, including The Berlin Review, The Massachusetts Review, Palestine Everywhere, and The New York Review of Books. His poetry collection “Betrayed by a Fortune Teller” was published by Dar Huruf in Kuwait in 2018. He published two children's books with the Tamer Foundation in Ramallah: “My Heart is Like the Moon” in 2022 and “The Latecomers’ Queue” in 2023.

AHMED SALEH is a Palestinian writer and poet from Gaza, currently based in Brussels. He holds degrees in Business Administration and Political Science. He has published numerous articles across various platforms and the poetry collection, “Gaza on the Cross.” He is a member of the Ecoversities Alliance and a former resident of the international literary house Passa Porta, Brussels. In October 2024, he was awarded a three-month literary residency at the cultural space Celador, Brussels.