Ibtisam Azem

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in the 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and then the US, where she works in New York as a senior correspondent for the Arabic newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed . She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her...See more

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in the 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and then the US, where she works in New York as a senior correspondent for the Arabic newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed . She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her story collection, City of Strangers , is forthcoming in Arabic in 2025. The Book of Disappearance has been translated into a number of languages. See less