Raja Shehadeh

Raja Shehadeh was born in Jaffa in 1951; his family moved to Ramallah, where he has lived ever since, through decades of occupation. Trained as a lawyer, he co-founded Al-Haq — Law in the Service of Man — in 1979, the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation that documented violations in the occupied territory and became an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists. Alongside his legal work he built a parallel life as Palestine’s leading prose writer in English.

His books move between memoir, law, and landscape. Palestinian Walks (2007), which won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008, records seven walks through the West Bank hills across three decades, as settlements, roads, and barriers steadily erase the terrain he loves. Later works, including Occupation Diaries and We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I — about his father Aziz, a lawyer assassinated in 1985 — extend the same patient, exact witness to Palestinian life.

Selected works

• Strangers in the House (2002)
• Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007)
• Occupation Diaries (2012)
• We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2022)

Sources

• Raja Shehadeh — Profile Books
• Raja Shehadeh — The New Press
• Al-Haq