Rabai al-Madhoun

Rabai al-Madhoun is a Palestinian novelist and journalist born in 1945 in Al-Majdal (now Ashkelon, Israel). He has lived in exile for most of his life, spending years in Lebanon and the Gulf before settling in London, where he has worked as a journalist for Arab publications. His experience of Palestinian exile and dispersal is central to his fiction. Al-Madhoun is the author of several novels, including Sayyidat al-Zill (Lady of the Shadow). His novel Destinies: Concerto of the Holocaust and the Nakba (Masaïr: Concerto al-Hawkah wa al-Nakba, 2015) won the IPAF in 2016. The novel is an ambitious, formally innovative work that juxtaposes two narratives: a Palestinian refugee's journey and a Holocaust survivor's story, exploring the parallel traumas of dispossession. The novel engages with the explosive politics of drawing parallels between the Holocaust and the Nakba with intellectual courage and emotional nuance. It was widely praised for its formal ambition and its willingness to enter difficult territory. Al-Madhoun is a significant Palestinian literary voice, one who has lived the experience of exile that shapes so much Palestinian fiction and who brings decades of journalistic observation to his literary work.