“Writing in English about Palestine, I often find myself asked if my aim is to educate ‘Westerners’, a suggestion I always find reductive and kind of undignified. But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves. If there was another lesson I learned, in the episode of writing my depressed story, it was the quite basic one that literature is not life, and that the material we draw from the world needs to undergo some metamorphosis in order to function, or even to live, on the page.”