Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
Raja Shehadeh
Six walks across twenty-six years in the hills around Ramallah — an Orwell Prize-winning elegy for a landscape being lost to settlements and the wall.
Raja Shehadeh began walking the hills around Ramallah in the late 1970s, following the old paths — the sarha, the aimless roaming beloved of Palestinians — before he understood he was moving through a vanishing world. The six walks of this book span twenty-six years: from open hillsides where the only tracks are shepherds’, to a terrain sliced by settlements, bypass roads, and finally the separation wall, where walking itself becomes trespass.
Each walk is set against a stage of the conflict, and the destruction of the landscape becomes a measure of the destruction of Palestinian life and attachment to the land. Winner of the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing, Palestinian Walks is both exquisite nature writing and a quiet, devastating record of loss.
About the author
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer from Ramallah, co-founder of the pioneering human rights organization Al-Haq. His books include Strangers in the House, Occupation Diaries, and Where the Line Is Drawn.
Details
- Published by Profile Books (UK) and Scribner (US), 2007
- Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, 2008
The edition
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Connected in the archive
13 connected records13 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 2 records
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- Raja Shehadehرجا شحادة
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Raja Shehadeh began walking the hills around Ramallah in the late 1970s, following the old paths — the sarha, the aimless roaming beloved of Palestinians — before he understood he was moving through a vanishing world.
- Ramallahرام الله
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Raja Shehadeh began walking the hills around Ramallah in the late 1970s, following the old paths — the sarha, the aimless roaming beloved of Palestinians — before he understood he was moving through a vanishing world.
on a related subject — 11 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- +972 Magazine
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "occupation".
- A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- Haydar Abd al-Shafi at Madrid: We Come to You From a Tortured Land
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "occupation".
- I Saw Ramallah
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "occupation".
- Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "memoir".
- and 5 more
Cite this page
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- Chicago
“Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/palestinian-walks/.- MLA
“Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/palestinian-walks/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-palestinian-walks, title = {Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/palestinian-walks/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }