Wednesday 20 November,
6.30–9pm
LAUNCH: ROCK FLIGHT BY HASIB HOURANI
Please join us for the launch of Hasib Hourani's debut collection, rock flight (Prototype Publishing, 2024). Hasib will be joined by Eve Esfandiari-Denney and Sascha Aurora Akhtar.
rock flight is a book-length poem that follows a personal and historical narrative to compose an understated yet powerful allegory of Palestine’s occupation. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within and outside Palestine. It depicts a restlessness brought about by dispossession, and a determination to find significance in fleeting objects and fragments. It looks to the literary form as an interactive experience, and the book as an object in flux, inviting the reader to embark on an exploration of space, while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Formally claustrophobic, the poem morphs into irony, declaring everything a box while refusing to exist within one.
Hasib Hourani, born in Bahrain in 1996, is a Lebanese-Palestinian writer, editor, arts worker and educator who lives in so-called Australia. His 2021 essay, ‘when we blink’ was shortlisted in the Liminal and Pantera Press Nonfiction Prize and appears in the anthology, Against Disappearance. rock flight is his first book.
Eve Esfandiari-Denney is a funded PhD student at Royal Holloway University. Her debut pamphlet My Bodies This Morning This Evening was published with Bad Betty Press in 2022.
Sascha Aurora Akhtar has published seven collections of poetry. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, was shortlisted for the UBL Prize for Literary Excellence in 2023. Akhtar translated Belles-Lettres: Writings of Hijab Imtiaz Ali, the first translation of Ali’s ‘Adab-e-Zareen’, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Belles-Lettres received an Honourable Mention for the 2024 A.K. Ramanujan Prize for book translations from South Asian languages into English, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies. A third- generation psychic in the Lancashire lineage, Akhtar studied in Pakistan and at Bennington College, Vermont, and University of Amherst, Massachusetts.
Hasib Hourani's UK events have been made possible through the International Travel Fund for Authors and Illustrators (Creative Australia).