Atef Abu Saif

Atef Abu Saif is a Palestinian novelist and diarist of the Palestinian experience of war and occupation. Born in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza 1973, he relocated to the West Bank in 2019 and is currently the Minister for Culture in the Palestinian Authority. Excerpts from his diaries of the 2023-24 Israel-Hamas war have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Nation, Slate, The Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2015 Atef was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arab Fiction, also known as the "Arabic Man Booker". In 2018 he also won the Katari Prize for Best Arabic Novel (young writers category). In 2015 he published his diaries of the 2014 war on Gaza: The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (Comma Press), which was described by Molly Crabapple as "a modern classic of war literature."