Atef Abu Saif

Atef Abu Saif (عاطف أبو سيف; born 1973) is a Palestinian writer. His books have been translated into various languages, and his writings have also been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, and Slate. He has served as a spokesman for Fatah and served as Minister for Culture in the Palestine Authority since 2019.

Early life and education
Abu Saif was born in Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He studied at the University of Birzeit and the University of Bradford before going on to obtain a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence.

Writing
Since his literary debut in the late 1990s, Abu Saif has written a number of novels and short story collections. His novel A Suspended Life (2014) was shortlisted for the 2015 Arabic Booker Prize. He published five other novels: Shadows in the memory (1997), Tale of the Harvest Night (1998), The Snow Ball (2000), The Salty Grape of Paradise (2003), and Running in Place (2019). In addition to that he published two collections of short stories: Everything is Normal and Stories from Gaza Time. Abu Saif edited as well a collection of short stories from Gaza titled The Book of Gaza, which includes as well one of his own short stories. It was published by Comma 2014.

A Suspended Life is going to be published in English autumn 2016 by Bloomsbury.

His account of the 2014 Gaza conflict was published in English under the title The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire, with a foreword by Noam Chomsky. Extracts from the diaries have appeared in Western publications such as Slate, Guernica, The Guardian and The New York Times. The Diaries appeared in Germany 2015 under the title Frühstück mit der Drohne, from Unionsverlag.

Abu Saif's 2019 novel Running in Place was the first novel from Gaza to be translated into Hebrew and published in Israel.

Abu Saif's diary dispatches written while visiting in Gaza during the 2023 Israel-Hamas war were published in the New York Times and Slate magazine. They were published as a collected volume, titled Don't Look Left, in March 2024. The diary is an eyewitness record of the first 75 days of Israel-Gaza war; 45 days in his house in the north and another 30 days in a tent after his forced move to the south of the Gaza Strip. Reviewer Helena Kennedy wrote "It is hard to describe the cumulative effect this devastating chronicle has over 280 pages. It describes a mounting toll of death and destruction.... Gradually, it makes it clear that there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip."

Public service career
On 5 February 2018, Fatah's Information, Culture, and Ideology Commission commissioned him as a spokesman for Fatah. Since 2019, he has been the Minister for Culture in the Palestine Authority.

Life events
In March 2019, Palestinian Authority news organization Wafa published pictures that showed Saif, bruised and bandaged, clothed in blood-stained garments and lying on a hospital bed. Wafa said that Saif had been beaten as Hamas attacked protestors and journalists; protestors were on the streets to demand better living conditions.