I have been a Palestinian author for fifteen years.
For most of that time, I wrote in the comfortable distance of diaspora. From the UK, from the UAE, from wherever life placed me. I carried Palestine in my work, in my language, in the way I moved through rooms and conversations. But I wrote from safety.
Fatima writes from Gaza.
She has been writing for seven years. Through everything, and I won’t list everything, because you know, and because some things should not need to be catalogued to matter. She has continued.
Not quietly, in notebooks no one sees. She co-wrote a story in an anthology alongside Susan Abulhawa, one of the most widely read Palestinian authors alive. The anthology was translated into English and Italian, published in the United States and in Italy. She founded a literary initiative to help other women in Gaza tell their own stories.
And then she applied to The Noble Narrative for a scholarship.
The Noble Narrative is a hybrid online creative writing course I designed to help writers earnt he structure and craft behind powerful, authentic storytelling and then learn how to reach global markets. Off the back of my career- I wanted to do more to help other writers so no one faced the challenges of going mainstream as I once did.
Fatima applied, not because she needed someone to believe in her. Her track record does that. She applied because she wanted to go further, to reach more people, tell more truth, take the craft deeper.
I awarded her the scholarship without hesitation.
This is what the al-hakawati scholarship exists for. Not to rescue writers who are struggling. But to remove the distance between serious writers and serious craft, regardless of where they live or what it costs them to keep writing.
The storyteller’s role has always been to hold what the world tries to erase.
Fatima is already doing that. We are honoured to walk beside her.
Welcome, Fatima.
The Noble Narrative scholarship is open to writers who face genuine barriers to accessing this kind of training. If that is you, or someone you know apply at thenoblenarrative.com
Shereen Malherbe 