Samar Yazbek

A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period, she kept a diary of personal reflections on, and observations of, this historic time. Because of the outspoken views she published in...

Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of coloured crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since...

The potent latest from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station's 2013 bombing in the Lattakia mountains. This slim novel packs a punch. - Publishers Weekly In this new novel by Syria's most prominent writer of the National Book Award Finalist Planet of Clay, a wounded...

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each one of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. She has selected twenty-six of these narratives to share with the world. Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, who...