Name: Gaza’s Children Write Back: Child-Authored Writing, War, and Political Agency
Start: 2026-06-10T17:00:00+02:00
Location: c/o Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin, Germany

$Gaza\u2019s Children Write Back: Child-Authored Writing, War, and Political Agency$

EUME Berliner Seminar
»Gaza’s Children Write Back: Child-Authored Writing, War, and Political Agency«
https://tinyurl.com/nzdmb63r
Speaker: Loaay Wattad (EUME Fellow 2023-26)
Chair: Hanan Natour (Queen Mary University of London / EUME Fellow 2024-26)
This event will take place at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Wallotstraße 14, 14193 Berlin).
Please register in advance via [email protected].
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This talk examines child-authored narratives written by Palestinian children living under conditions of occupation, siege, war, and genocide. Focusing on projects such as "My First Book", "Children of the Sea Diaries", and "I Will Not Write Poetry" by the Tamer Institute for Community Education, the lecture explores how children use storytelling not only to document violence but also to assert narrative agency, resist erasure, and imagine alternative futures. Drawing on childhood studies, sociology of children’s literature, and postcolonial theory, the talk approaches these writings as literary and political acts shaped by fragmentation, non-linearity, and collective memory. It will also reflect on testimonies by children in Gaza and on the experience of conducting writing workshops under ongoing bombardment, asking what it means for children to write and imagine under conditions of extreme violence.
• Loaay Wattad is a cultural sociologist, writer, translator, and Minerva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on Palestinian and Israeli children’s literature, postcolonial studies, and the intersections of literature, politics, and childhood. His current work explores war writing, fantasy, displacement, and political imagination in children’s literature, including a book project on Palestinian and Israeli retellings of Little Red Riding Hood as political and cultural critique. He is also the author of the children’s book "Salman the Pirate Looks for Shirts".
• Hanan Natour is a German-Palestinian scholar of Arabic and Comparative Literature and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London, where she contributes to the UKRI-funded project "Digital Al-Andalus: Radical Perspectives Of and Through Al-Andalus". Hanan obtained her PhD in Arabic and Literary Studies with a thesis on narratives of liberation, emancipation, and decoloniality in modern Tunisian fiction at Freie Universität Berlin (2024). Together with Mohamed-Salah Omri (University of Oxford) she edited the first English-language volume devoted to the varieties of modern Tunisian literatures, "Tunisian Literatures – Multilingual Realities, Genealogies, Testimonies" (Bloomsbury, 2026). During her PhD, she served as a Research Associate to the ERC-funded project "PalREAD – The Reading and Reception of Palestinian Literature from 1948 to the Present". In the academic years 2025-27, Hanan is an affiliated EUME Fellow.