21 October 2025
7.00pm (doors open. 6.30pm)
Irish Cultural Centre, 5 Black’s Road, Hammersmith W6 9DT

Poetry of witness to the Gaza genocide, 
live-streamed to the world

Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash will be launching his latest work, in conversation with critic and writer Lucy Popescu, with readings from the original Arabic and English

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA and other poems
translated by the Arabic by Robin Moger

ALL WELCOME to this free event

7pm, 21 October 2025 (doors open 6.30pm)

Irish Cultural Centre, 5 Black's Road, Hammersmith W6 9DT  

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Samer Abu Hawwash

Samer Abu Hawwash is a Palestinian poet, writer and translator, born in Sidon, Lebanon, in 1972. His first poetry collection, Life is Printed in New York, was published in 1997 and this collection From the River to the Sea, his 11th, was published in Arabic in August 2024. He has translated into Arabic works by more than twenty American poets, including Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, Kim Addonizio, Robert Bly, as well as over forty prose works by major internationally renowned writers including Jack Kerouac, Yann Martel and Paul Auster.

 

Lucy Popescu

Lucy Popescu is a writer and editor with a background in human rights. She worked with the English Centre of PEN, the international association of writers, for over 20 years and was Director of its Writers in Prison Committee from 1991-2006. She is currently chair of the Authors’ Club. She’s the editor of two anthologies A Country to Call Home and A Country of Refuge, collections of writing on refugees and asylum seekers by some of Britain and Ireland’s finest writers. She is also a critic who contributes regularly to the Observer, Financial Times, TLS and other media. 

 

Margaret Obank

Margaret Obank is the co-founder of Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation with her husband, the Iraqi author and journalist Samuel Shimon, and of Banipal Publishing and Banipal Books.

With Banipal magazine she set up The Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, which in 2005 established the annual Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation (inaugural award 2006) and, in January 2010, the Banipal Arab British Centre Library of Modern Arab Literature in original English and English translation, with the lending library housed at the Arab British Centre.

 

This new collection by Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash was published in its original Arabic in the summer of 2024. The 24 poems are an intrepid literary journey into the genocide in Gaza, linking with Palestine’s long years of existential trauma, and documenting the universal human questions that so many are asking in today’s world. Living, since he was born, in a diaspora crowded with fellow Palestinians, the poet shares with readers the depths of his turmoil and anguish, searing their attention to human pain from the first poem, “The Ruins”, with the image of a girl’s hand jutting up from cracks in the rubble, to the last, “The Scream” – the roaring voice of dust consuming all.  In the poem, “Sitting in front of a TV screen, I watch the genocide”, the words he wants to say are torn from him, “language has become a torment” and he cannot say what he wants to say; senses are upturned, stupified, suspended, muffled, in a maze. 

How to possibly describe the deadly scenes, surreal visions, the revelations, nightmares, sounds, one after the other, except by reliving them?  And thus the poet brings to his poems what one critic has called a “dictionary of war”, a lexicon that expresses a graphic poetic sensibility set in the midst of a war that is exterminating a people. Alongside the lexicon, a way of “seeing” anew the unspeakable horrors through the gazes, the glances, the closed, open, dead eyes of famished families, of fragmented little corpses, children whose gazes are frozen, stunned, dead, scornful, fixed, dazed. Robin Moger’s translation is profoundly sensitive to the “stuttering shock” of these poems that “explore the edge of what can be made out of poetry, that force us to confront the potential for loss and grief to be endless and unjustifiable”.

“In From the River to the Sea, Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash evokes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in an elegiac collection that grapples with the crushing agony of personal and collective loss under the violence of bombardment and the deliberate starvation imposed on an entire people, ignored by the international community.” Joselyn Michelle Almeida, poet and translator

“Palestinian Samer Abu Hawwash’s poetry collection From the River to the Sea embodies a literary experience that transcends the limits of words, becoming an existential testament to the tragedy of the Palestinian people and humanity's bewilderment in the face of devastation and alienation.” Samir Kasimi, Algerian novelist and critic

"There is little comfort here, the lyric offers no respite, however brief, from the poems’ own stuttering shock. 'This is how I see them, and I see it all completely clear, dazzling bright:' opens The Massacre. What does he see? 'I see a foot where a hand should be, and a fist reaching from the mouth…' These are poems that explore the edge of what can be made out of poetry, that force us to confront the potential for loss and grief to be endless and unjustifiable.“  Robin Moger  

Copies of the book will be on sale for £10 (slight reduction of 99p) – cash or card

 We look forward to seeing you there.

ALL WELCOME

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