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Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. Her first novel The Parisian (2019) won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and has received literary fellowships from MacDowell and the Lannan Foundation. She is currently a fellow at the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.
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I noticed that one of the families in Nablus in the novel shares your last name, Hammad. Is there a connection there to your personal history?
The Hammads in the novel are based on my grandmother's maternal family; my surname actually comes from the man she married, my grandfather, who was from a separate branch of the same family. The main character, Midhat Kamal, is based loosely on my great grandfather, and the basic frame of the novel is inspired by stories I was told about Midhat when I was a child. In writing about the fictional Midhat, the principal question in my mind was: how does a young man like this, from Nablus, end up becoming "The Parisian"? My answer was in part a love story, but also a story about selfhood, dislocation, and longing, not only for people but also for place.
After being sent away to study in France during WWI, Midhat returns to Nablus and earns the nickname "The Parisian." What role does his education play in his identity and evolution as a character?
Midhat's time in France at the beginning of the novel is formative not only as an experience of rupture and rejection, but also as an object of his nostalgia. His continued obsession with France, most specifically with French clothes, is an ...
Muhsin Al-Ramli is an expatriate Iraqi poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and the translator of several classics of Spanish literature. He is also the cofounder and editor of Alwah, a magazine of Arabic ... (more)
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The Parisian
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Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; The Wrong End of the Telescope; and the story collection, The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. (more)
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The Parisian
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