Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense

By Marcello Di Cintio

Across Palestine, from the Allenby Bridge and Ramallah, to Jerusalem and Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio has met with writers, poets, librarians, booksellers and readers, finding extraordinary stories in every corner. Stories of how revolutionary writing was smuggled from the Naqab Prison; lost stories surrounding the looted books that sit in Israel’s National Library; and stories from the Gallery Café, whose opening three thousand creative intellectuals gathered to celebrate.

Pay No Heed to the Rockets offers a window into the literary heritage of Palestine, revealing a humanity often unreported. Paying homage to the memory of giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani and the contemporary authors whom they continue to inspire, this evocative, lyrical journey shares both the anguish and inspiration of Palestinian writers at work today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Saqi Books
• Release date: May 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9780863569852

Marcello Di Cintio

Marcello Di Cintio is the author of four books, including Walls: Travels Along the Barricades which won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize, and Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense—also a W. O. Mitchell Prize winner. Di Cintio’s magazine writing has appeared in publications such as The International New York Times, The Walrus, Canadian Geographic and Afar. Di Cintio has served as a writer-in-residence at the Calgary Public Library, the University of Calgary, and the Palestine Writing Workshop, and he teaches nonfiction writing at the annual WordsWorth youth writing residency.