Nathalie Handal
Nathalie Handal is from Bethlehem, Palestine. She was raised in France and Latin America, and educated in the United Kingdom, the USA and the Arab world. Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Kumunyakaa writes, ‘This cosmopolitan voice belongs to the human family, and it luxuriates in crossing necessary borders. One of the most important voices of her generation.’
She is the author of numerous books, most recently the critically acclaimed Poet in Andalucía, which Alice Walker lauds as ‘poems of depth and weight and the sorrowing song of longing and resolve,’ and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, which The New York Times described as ‘a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).’ Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, and Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, among other honours. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words Without Borders. Her collection The Invisible Star / La estrella invisible, will be published by Valparaíso Ediciones, Spain this Fall 2014.
Nathalie’s series of poems for Palestine – A Heart in the Sea – is published in Transcript. Read it here.