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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