In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with
hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of
that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed.
From these encounters
comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of
twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five,
whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as
one of the most savage military offensives of our time.
Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a
bombing, the book’s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans.
That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss – homes
shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and mechanisms of cruelty
that defy comprehension.
In gathering these
testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and
the survivors’ determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.
About the Author
Samar Yazbek, born in 1970, is a Syrian writer and
journalist. A prominent advocate for human and women’s rights, she took part in
the 2011 popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile
soon after. She was named one of the Beirut39 most promising authors under the
age of forty in 2010 and was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize International Writer
of Courage Award in 2012, followed by the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch
Oxfam/PEN Prize. In 2022, she was selected as one of twelve International Writers
by the Royal Society of Literature. Yazbek has published two collections of
short stories, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has
been translated into over twenty languages.
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of
contemporary Arabic fiction. She has been a Finalist for the National Book
Award for Translated Literature three times: in 2024 for her translation of
Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home; in 2021 for her
translation of Samar Yazbek’s Planet of Clay; and in 2019 for
Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work, which also won the 2020 Saif
Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
