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We are hugely excited to welcome to Bath the celebrated Palestinian writer, scholar and activist Tareq Baconi, in conversation with Max Porter about his ‘incandescent’ new book, ‘What Now: On Palestine, freedom, and our global future’.Imagining a free Palestine is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, he writes, but a new struggle for a just future in the aftermath of Zionism – not by fighting Jewish presence in Palestine but by ending Jewish political exclusivity.
A free Palestine would heal the wounds left in the wake of the Second World War, by challenging and upturning the colonial and genocidal mindsets that continue to animate Western thought. The ramifications of justice would therefore extend far beyond the borders of Palestine…
Ahmed Alnaouq has called ‘What Now’ ‘one of the most important books written on Palestine in many years’.
‘At once searing, loving and rousing,’ Naomi Klein says, it is ‘an acrobatic feat of political leadership from a generational talent. Baconi conjures dazzling levels of intellectual courage and ethical clarity to imagine true freedom in the grips of a genocide, a freedom that flatly refuses to replicate or mirror the oppressor.’
Baconi ‘not only wrests incandescent insight out of overwhelming defeat and despair,’ says Pankaj Mishra, author of ‘The World after Gaza’. ‘He dares to offer that rare thing these days: hope in a better future.’
Tareq Baconi is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa. He grew up between Amman and Beirut.
Besides ‘What Now’, he is the author of ’Hamas Contained: A history of Palestinian resistance’ (2018) and the memoir ‘Fire in Every Direction’ (2026). His journalism has appeared in the ’New York Times’, the ’New York Review of Books’ and the ’London Review of Books’ among other periodicals.
His award-winning short ’One Like Him’, a queer love story set in Jordan, has been screened by more than 30 festivals.
Max Porter FRSL is a multi-award-winning novelist and published poet. An adaptation of his 2019 novel ’Lanny’ is currently being staged at Bristol Old Vic.
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