Interview with Husam Maarouf, founder of Gaza Publications1
Translated from Arabic by Alaa Alqaisi
Tell us about yourself, about your own work and writing.
I’m a Palestinian poet, journalist, and publisher based in Gaza City, where a genocide is unfolding. I write essays on literature and journalistic pieces that focus on the human dimension, on all the violations people have endured. That includes both the violence of the occupation and the crushing economic conditions that have affected everyone in Gaza, before and during this genocide.
My work has been published in numerous Arab and international outlets, including the London-based Al Majalla, Raseef22, Al Jazeera Net, Anadolu Agency, ArabLit, and previously Erm News. I’ve published two poetry collections—Death Smells Like Glass and The Barber Loyal to His Dead Clients—and a novel called Ram’s Chisel. I was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Museum Prize for Prose Poetry in 2015, as well as the Badr Al-Turki Foundation Award for Arabic Prose Poetry in the same year.
Where are you sitting now, as you respond to these questions? What and who is around you? How long have you been there, and how did you get there?
Right now, I’m in the north of Gaza City, a border area that’s bombed day and night. I’m here with my small family. We’re suffering from the horrors of this war every single moment: constant danger and skyrocketing prices. Since the war started, I’ve been displaced multiple times: first to central Gaza City, then to Rafah, where I was displaced again, twice. After that, we were forced to move to Deir al-Balah. In January 2025, I returned to Gaza City, to find it devastated beyond recognition. I came back on foot, carrying on my shoulders the burden of war, the sorrow and longing of displacement, and a few belongings. I walked ten kilometers until I arrived at my home again, which had been partially destroyed by bombing.
How did the idea of creating a publishing house come about? Was it something you’ve always dreamed about, or was it born out of this moment and these circumstances? Is it something you’ve attempted to do in the past?
I’ve had the idea for a long time but never managed to bring it to life. Maybe because of work pressure and how busy I was as a journalist. But a few months ago, I finally committed to turning it into reality. What pushed me forward were the stories—people’s heartbreak, and my own. They’ve become too much for anyone to carry alone. Stories of loss, injustice, destruction, and erasure. The pain of young people, of mothers, children, fathers. The disappearance of everything that was once alive. That’s when I realized: Someone needs to record all this. And that became my mission.
I kept thinking about the Nakba of 1948, how little we actually know about it, even though some survivors gave their testimonies. So much of that history went undocumented. That’s why Gaza Publications was born, to record and preserve people’s emotions and testimonies about the genocide. They must remain alive, confronting the present, carrying the story forward into the future in the way it truly happened, so that these testimonies and literary works remain a thorn in the eye of the occupation. Something that can someday be taken to court.
Who else can protect the rights of the grieving and brokenhearted, if not a linguistic document that will last forever? And that document can take many forms—a novel, short stories, testimony, a play, a poetry collection. Each one can reach people, anywhere in the world.
I hope the books we publish will be translated into English and into other languages eventually, Spanish and French are already on our list.
Who is the team behind Gaza Publications? How did you all meet?
Right now, the team includes me and our coordinator, visual artist Lamees Al-Sharif. We also work with designers who handle book layouts and covers, plus a few copy editors and proofreaders. Some of our team members are based in Germany. They take care of printing and distribution.
We’re hoping to bring in new people and skills that can help us reach more readers across the Arab world. In the meantime, we’re lucky to have support from friends and public figures in different countries who believe in the project and help share its message.
Can you tell us more about what it actually means, in practical terms, to set up a publishing house in the midst of a genocide? How long has this been in the works? What are the difficulties? Was there anything that was actually easier than it might have been before?
I know the idea sounds almost impossible, given the extraordinary circumstances Gaza is going through. I feel dizzy writing these answers. Like nearly two million others in Gaza, I have been under siege and starvation for a hundred days. I’m hungry. And still, I have to keep going with my journalism, with Gaza Publications, just to be able to buy things that now cost fifty times more than before. I’m writing to you from the heart of a real catastrophe, but we have to keep going. We have to survive.
To me, Gaza Publications—in these conditions—means trying to reach out with a severed hand. Who’s going to sew that hand back to the body?
I’ve often thought about tombstones, about the phrases and engravings on them. I’ve always felt they hold part of the life that’s now buried. They are the only part of the dead that remains in this world, an open hand held out forever, saying, “I was once here. Remember me.” That’s how I see Gaza Publications. As that very tombstone. I hope it will last to tell the world that there was once a grave here.
But there are challenges everywhere: Communications are down because the cell towers were bombed. We’re starving. Sometimes we can’t even keep up with the work. We can’t print anything inside Gaza. There are no offices to work from, as most buildings have been bombed, and the remaining homes are packed with displaced families. The work is exhausting, but we have a purpose that keeps us going.
Nothing has gotten easier since the genocide began. There is no single road back to the life we once had. Just worn-out minds, stretched thin by hunger, trying to keep working in a broken world. Still, we hope to keep going. We hope the path ahead won’t vanish.
Everything we publish at Gaza Publications is a new document—our document—a step on the long road back to life.
Your first book is a collection of short stories called The Man Who Looked Back. Can you describe the stories to us and tell us more about the writer? How was this book chosen?
The Man Who Looked Back is by Amer Al-Masri, a Palestinian writer from Khan Younis.2 He recently left Gaza, trying to escape the suspended fate that hangs over so many young people in this city, before and during the genocide. This isn’t your usual book about war or siege. Al-Masri isn’t focused on the destruction itself; he’s writing about what comes after. The fragments. The quiet grief. The moments when hope feels like fiction.
His stories focus on everyday life in Gaza: that of a young man burned out by unemployment, a mother raising her kids under constant threat, grandparents whose stories no longer offer comfort, families slowly crumbling under the weight of fear and hunger and loss.
The past five wars are not mere background here; they’re a heavy hand that has reshaped everything. Language, dreams, desire, even the meaning of safety has become relative, if not entirely lost.
Since 2008, the Gaza Strip has felt like a sealed box. Over 200,000 university graduates are unemployed. A whole generation has turned to selling on sidewalks, driving broken cars, or working day by day with no future in sight.
The sea, once a sign of freedom, has become a last resort. In Al-Masri’s stories, you see a generation preparing for its great gamble: migration, embracing risk, even if it means death at sea, like the dozens who drowned trying to reach the shores of Cyprus or Greece.
But The Man Who Looked Back is not just a testimony of men. It is also an eye turned toward Palestinian women inside Gaza: the mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters, those who have carried so much of the weight in silence, under a long war that did not start on October 7, 2023, as the world thinks. It began long before, with the siege, the poverty, the systematic suffocation.
In this book, genocide is not a single event, it is an ongoing condition. It prevents youth from dreaming, it crushes families until they break, it turns stepping outside into a death sentence.
Amer Al-Masri did not write a transient text, he has crafted a document, a record of daily life that will be forgotten if no one writes it down.
Even hope feels like a luxury. Even dreams are deferred. Palestinians have learned to survive more than they’ve learned to live.
This collection makes a deeply painful statement: “Genocide is not just missiles and shells—it’s also the prolonged siege that has made Palestinians think every day about how to leave their land, not how to remain in it.”
The Man Who Looked Back is not just a collection of stories. It is an accounting of a tragedy that has not ended. And may not end anytime soon.
What about upcoming books? Do you already have some titles in mind and a rough “schedule?”
We’re currently working on two titles. The first is a novel titled I Am at Your Door by the Palestinian writer Riham Al-Sabea, which offers a personal vision of the genocide in all its details.
The second is a collection of texts by the Palestinian writer Bisan Nateel, a mix of testimonies and daily reflections on the genocide. Both writers are from Gaza.
What do you dream about when you think of developing this project further?
It’s not about a dream, it’s about an immense effort that must be made to bring life back to Gaza, and to preserve full human rights: emotional, cultural, and existential.
We are working under nearly impossible conditions—financially and logistically—and relying on self-funding to keep going. We hope that the publishing house’s sales can eventually become its main source of income, both for us and for the writers in Gaza, so that we can keep publishing our books. And I hope that hands from all over the world—writers, intellectuals, and those who care—will reach out to Gaza Publications to help develop and support it so we can continue.
Husam Maarouf is a Palestinian poet and journalist, and the founder of Gaza Publications. His work has been published in numerous Arab and international outlets, including the London-based Al Majalla, Raseef22, Al-Jazeera, Anadolu Agency, ArabLit, and Erm News. He has published a novel and two poetry collections. He was awarded the Mahmoud Darwish Museum Prize for Prose Poetry in 2015, as well as the Badr al-Turki Foundation Award for Arabic Prose Poetry in the same year. You can read more of his work at ArabLit.