Reading & Conversation with Hanan Natour

When 38-year-old actress Sonia visits her family in Haifa after years in London, she realises the complexity of her relationship with Palestine. She meets a theatre director and joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, but the rehearsals come under pressure: Israeli checkpoints and arrests characterise the everyday life of the Palestinian acting troupe. What can Shakespeare's play tell us in this country haunted by violence and trauma? 

A staged reading from the novel will complement the conversation.

Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian author. She grew up in London and currently lives in both London and New York. Granta magazine named her one of its “Best Young Novelists under 40.” Her debut novel, The Parisian, was selected by The New York Times as one of the most important books of 2019, was sold to 16 countries, and won both the Betty Trask Award and the Palestine Book Award. For Enter Ghost, she received the Encore Award for Best Second Novel as well as the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was also nominated for the Ondaatje Prize and the 2024 Women’s Prize.

Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian Postdoctoral Researcher of Arabic and Comparative Literature at EXC 2020 and an Associated Fellow of the programme Europe in the Middle East — The Middle East in Europe (EUME). She obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on modern Tunisian fiction (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024). Her first monograph The Tunisian Novel – Narratives of Liberation, Emancipation and Decoloniality is forthcoming (2026). During her PhD, she served as Research Associate to the ERC-funded project PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present. 

The event is part of the cooperative series Echo. Echo: Ghosts of the Past between the Cluster "Temporal Communities" and the international literature festival Berlin (ilb).