Asmaa Azaizeh (1985) will be our guest at the Residency for Writers in Amsterdam between the 26th of February and the 8th of March. This Palestinian poet and journalist is one of the foreign curators of the new Read my World festival that will take place at the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam this fall.
As a kick-off for the festival the SLAA will organise an afternoon with Azaizeh on Sunday, the 3rd of March, 15.00 at the public library of Amsterdam. She will introduce (the work of) eight Palestinian poets, writers and bloggers. This afternoon is the first of three meetings with the festival curators from the Arabic region. On the 6th of March Perdu Amsterdam will record an international edition of VersSpreken live with writer in residence Asmaa ‘Azaizeh.
For its first edition the festival aims to bring the stories behind the headlines about the Arab Spring. Those stories that will not have reached the Dutch news, but that have surely had a great impact on the Arab societies. To be able to prepare the festival adequately, the organization has invited Azaizeh, expecting her involvement to contribute to the authenticity and originality of the festival’s programme.
Asmaa Azaizeh (1985) graduated from the University of Haifa with a degree in English Literature and Journalism in 2006. As of 2004, she has been working as a journalist for different Palestinian and Arabic newspapers. At the same time, she is working for a radio station and hosts several television programs on social and cultural topics. Besides that, she is the director of the Mahmoud Darwish Museum at Ramallah and the editor of poetry at qadita.net, a political-cultural website. After she won the A.M. Qatan Foundation Award in 2011, her first collection of poems Liwa was published in Amman that same year. Her poems have been translated into English, German, Italian, Swedish, Hebrew, and Farsi. She gives workshops on ‘creative writing’ and is currently working on an audio-visual project that will be published alongside her second book.
