Palestinian Walks

When the author first started hill walking in Palestine, in the late 1970s, he was not aware that he was travelling through a vanishing landscape. Recording how the land felt and looked before various calamities, this title attempts to preserve, at least in words, the Palestinian natural treasures that many Palestinians never know.

Shehadeh does a tremendous job ... one of the most compelling things you will read this summer.

He distills his pain and anger into eloquent prose, meticulously counting the ways he loves the land ... Palestinian Walks is no trite exercise in myth-making or propaganda.

Shehadeh is always engaging ... delivering what many activists neglect to mention: the odd, slightly absurd details that really touch people; things that appear off camera, away from news reports.

An important testament to political failure, never more relevant than today.

A new geography has come into being. This beautiful book is not just a guide to the Palestinian present; it is an Israeli album of what is taking place in a faraway land: Palestine.

Few Palestinians have opened their minds and hearts with such frankness

Shehadeh writes beautifully, his language infused with a lyrical, melancholic sense of loss. An important record of a land marked by conflict that is changing everyday

Towards any proper understanding of history there are many small paths. I strongly suggest you walk with him.

Palestinian Walks is a stoic account of a particular place, but one which has universal resonance. The judges felt it made landscape into the essence of politics, and political writing into an art

Shehadeh describes howthe destruction of a beloved landscape mirrors the damage to Palestinian identity...lyrical nature-writing with understated political passion

Palestinian Walks provides a rare historical insight into the tragic changes taking place in Palestine.

This is a beautiful book and a sad one.

Readers... would do well to reckon with the painful particulars of Shehadeh's account, which is at once gentle and angry, resolute and realistic.

Raja Shehadeh is Palestine's leading writer. He is also a lawyer and the founder of the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. Shehadeh was a National Book Award finalist in 2023 and is the author of several acclaimed books published by Profile, including the Orwell Prize-winning Palestinian Walks. He lives in Ramallah.