Ibrahim Nasrallah

Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian-Jordanian poet, novelist, artist and photographer born in Amman in 1954 to Palestinian parents displaced during the Nakba of 1948. Raised in the Al-Wehdat refugee camp, he studied at UNRWA schools before working as a teacher in Saudi Arabia and later in journalism and cultural organisations in Jordan. His writing is deeply concerned with exile, identity, memory and resistance, drawing on both his family’s displacement and the wider history of the Palestinian people.

Nasrallah’s major literary undertaking is the interconnected Palestinian Tragicomedy series, which spans roughly 250 years of Palestinian history. Its novels include Time of White Horses, a multigenerational account of village life from Ottoman rule to the Nakba, and The Lanterns of the King of Galilee, centred on eighteenth-century ruler Zahir al-Umar. His dystopian novel The Second War of the Dog won the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and he later became the 2026 laureate of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. His fiction combines intimate family histories with political upheaval, presenting Palestinians as active participants in their own complex and varied history.