Join us for an illuminating conversation on Isabella Hammad‘s second novel, Enter Ghost, a story of family, remembrance, and shared resistance.
Reeling from a failed marriage, Sonia, a British-Palestinian actor, returns to Haifa, Israel, to visit her estranged sister. When Sonia meets a local director, Miriam, she is roped into the staging of Hamlet in the historic city of Ramallah, in the West Bank. While initially resistant, Sonia begins to feel a sense of belonging and a respect for her fellow Palestinian actors, who want Hamlet to speak to Palestine’s history. Enter Ghost expertly dives into Sonia’s past, tracing where her relationship with her family, and Palestine, diverged. As Hamlet’s opening night draws closer, Sonia realizes how many obstacles the production and its actors face. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
Hammad’s debut novel, The Parisian, illuminates a pivotal period of 20th-century Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
Please note, this event will not be recorded.
About the speaker:
Isabella Hammad was born in London. Her writing has appeared publications including Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times. 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, 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, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation. She was selected as one of the Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ in 2023. Her second novel, Enter Ghost, was published in 2023.
