Ahmed Masoud, Gaza: Where Art Breathes Life

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Image courtesy of CCCB.

In this talk, Palestinian novelist and writer Ahmed Masoud will be exploring how, in the course of history, Gaza has maintained a central role in the cultural life of Palestine and the Middle East. As he sees it, art and literature have been vital to the survival of the city and its communities throughout decades of occupation and war, and, more recently, during Isarael’s genocide. 

Modern Palestinian literature has been termed the “literature of resistance,” a body of works specifically conceived to challenge Israeli occupation and its colonial stereotypes. For Masoud, who grew up in Gaza, literature has given people sumud (resilience) to enable them to endure years of harsh reality. Poetry, for example, became a means of therapy and comfort that gave writers and readers the necessary hope to survive. 

Ahmed Masoud is the author of the novel Vanished: The Mysterious Disappearance of Mustafa Ouda (Just World Books, 2025), a fictional narrative set in the context of political instability in Palestine that follows a young man’s search for his missing father. His second novel, Come What May (2022), unfolds like a crime story in a war zone, raising disturbing questions: does it matter how someone is killed in a place where death is omnipresent? 

Event will be held in Catalan and English. 

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