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Hailed as one of Britain’s best young novelists, Isabella Hammad burst onto the scene in 2019 with “The Parisian”, a sweeping historical novel inspired by the life of her grandfather. Her second novel “Enter Ghost” examines identity, art and resistance in the Palestinian Territories.
It tells the story of a British-Palestinian actress who returns to her homeland to visit her sister and gets caught up in a West Bank production of “Hamlet”. Inspired in part by a documentary about a theatre school in the Jenin refugee camp, Hammad says she was interested in exploring theatre as an art form in the context of a military regime.
She spoke to Alison Sargent about politics, “Hamlet” and the silencing of Palestinian voices.