Your first book, Edward Said’s After the Last Sky, is all about exile.

It’s one of my favourite books by the author. I even prefer it to his memoir, Out of Place. While working as a consultant at the U.N. International Conference on the Question of Palestine, Said suggested they hang photographs of Palestinians, taken by the leading Swiss photographer, Jean Mohr, in the entrance hall at the main venue in Geneva. The only text allowed on the captions was place names. The situation upset him and he decided to write a book about the pictures. In the process, he wrote about his own exile and memories of 1948.

The photographs were taken in refugee camps, Lebanon, the West Bank and other areas. He writes in the introduction that the collection is ‘a personal rendering of the Palestinians as a dispersed national community… proud, tender, miserable, funny, indomitable, ironic, paranoid, defensive, assertive, attractive, compelling.’ The result is touching and beautifully accomplished.

Is there a particular picture you remember?

One was taken at the Allenby Bridge in 1967 at the time of the Palestinian exodus after the Six-Day War. Perhaps I respond to it so strongly because I vividly remember that terrible time. It led to the occupation of the West Bank, where I live.

He also writes very touchingly about Lebanon, where he lived for a while. One of the book’s four sections is called After the Last Sky, from a poem by my next author, Mahmoud Darwish. The full line is: ‘Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky?’ It’s very evocative. At the end, Said writes: ‘I would like to think that we are not just the people seen or looked at in these photographs: we are also looking at ourselves.’ He wants to distance himself from those who see the Palestinians as passive or as mere objects to be scrutinised.

Your next choice is Mahmoud Darwish’s Mural, translations of two epic poems by the great Palestinian poet.

Darwish spent his adult life in Israel. The village where he was born was destroyed in 1948. He started writing poetry when he was very young. He later became a communist and was very active politically, although he spent some time in prison. Palestinians living in Israel until 1967 endured a military government and there were many restrictions on their lives. Darwish went abroad to study and stayed away. Leaving Israel was a difficult decision for him.

He wrote a lot of great poetry. His earlier poems were patriotic and populist, but not simplistic. As his poetry developed, it became more complex. The book’s first poem, Mural, was written after he underwent life-threatening heart surgery. The second, The Dice Player, is a reflection on the nature of chance in life. The translation is very fine: Rema Hammami and John Berger take a few liberties but always keep to the spirit of the poems. It’s a joy to read and among the very best Palestinian literature.

Let’s turn to Adina Hoffman’s intriguingly-entitled My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness.

This is an amazing biography of the Arab-Israeli poet Taha Muhammad Ali, who was 40 years old when his poetry was first published. The biography’s author, Adina Hoffman, is an Israeli writer living in Jerusalem. Ali has a more oblique way of saying things than Darwish, and has a voice that isn’t overtly political. He came from the little village of Saffuriyya, which the Israeli army captured and demolished in 1948 when he was a teenager. He continues to live in Nazareth, in a house overlooking the place where he grew up. He has spent much of his life coming to terms with the political upheavals he survived.

What’s interesting is the emotional process Hoffman went through while researching the book. She had to face up to what her adopted country had done in 1948 and what happened to the Palestinians who stayed in Israel. She studied Arabic in order to read the poetry and speak with Ali and his family in their own language. She wanted to get behind the façade and she does a tremendous job. Literature became a way for Palestinians in Israel to preserve their identity. The book charts a difficult journey.

Your next book, Footnotes in Gaza, is by the cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco.

This is an amazing, graphic and emotional book.