Sepideh Farsi's 8 essential books about Palestine
The director selects the poems and prose that have marked her
Earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, we interviewed Sepideh Farsi on her heart-wrenching documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which charts the Iranian filmmaker’s correspondence with Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona as she documented and endured Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Hassona and her family were later targeted and killed at their Gaza home by the IDF only a day after Farsi informed her the film would be premiering at the festival.
One of the year’s most urgent films, as Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk has its UK and Irish release in cinemas on 22nd August, Farsi provides us a personal list of reading on Palestine.
Karim Kattan, The Palace on the Higher Hill (2025)
"Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine, one of his own imagination, where hope and despair are constantly cohabiting."
Ghayath Almadhoun, I have brought you a severed hand (2025)
"I came across Ghayath’s poetry and met him when I was in NY earlier this year. His personal trajectory as a forever-exiled-Palestinian between Syria, Sweden and Germany, and the way this reflects through his poetry and his way of being, is admirable."
Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World (2019) & Mornings in Jenin (2006)
"These pages are so similar to all that we have been witnessing in the occupied Palestine, for decades, now reaching a turning point. Written some 15 years ago, and still so to the point, so strong."
Sayed Kashua, Let it be Morning (2006)
"His schizophrenic writing and being, as a Palestinian-Israeli, his wavering between Hebrew and the absent-present Arabic (his parent’s native tongue), and his sense of humour confer a permanent sense of tightroping to his prose."
Mona Hajjar Halabv, In My Mother’s Footsteps (2021)
“‘Refugees are like seeds that scatter in the wind, and land in different soils that become their reluctant homes’ my mother once told me.' writes Mona Halaby, and I can relate deeply to these lines."
Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die (2024)
"What he achieved in his poetry, and through his short life, before being targeted by the Israeli Army in December 2023 gives a mixed taste of ashes and blood. Powerful…"
Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness (1995)
"Darwish’s words are so intertwined with the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems, so full of the smell of the Palestinian coffee with Cardamome, and now, with the memory of Fatma Hassona, forever."
Hiba Abu Nada, Oxygen is Not for the Dead (2017)
“On the evening of October 20, Hiba Abu Nada was martyred with her family under bombardment in their home in the Manara neighborhood of Khan Yunis. She wrote in one her last poems: 'And if on day, Ô light / None of the galaxies / Nowhere in the universe / Had no place for us any more / You would say: Come into my heart/ You will be safe in here.”