Ghassan Kanafani
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Ghassan Kanafani (born 1936 in Acre, Palestine - died July 8, 1972 in Beirut at age 36) was a Palestinian writer and political activist for Palestinian liberation. He was an official spokesperson for the PFLP at the time of his death. He and his niece were assassinated by a bomb planted in his car. It is widely believed to have been planted by agents of Israel, which had a policy of assassinating Palestinian figures. He wrote primarily on the themes of Palestinian liberation.
In 1948, Kanafani and his family were forced into exile. He lived in Lebanon then in Syria as a Palestinian refugee. Kanafani completed his secondary education in Damascus and received a United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) teaching certificate in 1952. That same year he enrolled in the Department of Arabic Literature at the University of Damascus but was expelled in 1955 as a result of his involvement in the pan-Arabist Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN), to which he had been recruited by Dr. George Habash when the two met in 1953. His thesis, Race and Religion in Zionist Literature, formed the basis for his 1967 study On Zionist Literature.
Books
- Note :Some Names are roughly Translated
- Mawt Sarir raqm 12, 1961 (Death of bed No. 12)
- Ard al-burtukal al-hazin, 1963 (The Land of the sad Oranges)
- Rijal fi-al-shams, 1963 (Men in the Sun)
- al-Bab, 1964 (The Door)
- Alam laysa lana, 1965 (A world that is not ours)
- Adab al-muqawamah fi filastin al-muhtalla 1948-1966, 1966 (The Literature of resistance in Occupied Palestine)
- Ma tabaqqa lakum, 1966 (All That's Left to You)
- Fi al-Adab al-sahyuni, 1967
- al-Adab al-filastini al-muqawim tahta al-ihtilal: 1948-1968, 1968
- An al-rijal wa-al-banadiq, 1968
- Umm Sad, 1969 (The Mother of Sa'd)
- A'id ila Hayfa, 1970 (Returning to Haifa)
- al-A ma wa-al-atrash, 1972
- Barquq Naysan, 1972
- al-Qubba'ah wa-al-nabi, 1973
- Thawrat 1936-39 fi filastin, 1974
- Jusr ila al-abad, 1978
- al-Qamis al-masruq wa-qisas ukhra, 1982 (the stolen shirt and other stories)
- 'The Slave Fort' in Arabic Short Stories, 1983 (trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies)