children of the dew (forthcoming)

by Mohammad al-as’ad / translated from arabic (palestine) by Maia tabet & anaheed al-hardeen

Winner, English PEN

From the late Palestinian poet Mohammad Al-As’ad comes a chronicle of the vanished village from which he was expelled, its geography, and its people.

Children of the Dew is the late poet Mohammad Al-As’ad’s first venture into literature beyond poetry. Genre bending poetic prose, the work centres on the expulsion of the author and his family from Umm al-Zinat, a Palestinian Mt. Carmel village in the Haifa district, upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

Moving between the author’s childhood memories, the villager’s stories, and the later exile to eastern Palestine and eventually southern Iraq, Children of the Dew is a haunting poetic representation in magic realist style of the Nakba, the event which continues to structure the Palestinian quest for freedom and liberation in historic Palestine and in exile today.

PRAISE

'Written in 1991, Children of the Dew tells a memory that is searching for itself, finding it itself; poetry, resurrecting the images and words, offers [the author] possibilities that History tried to erase' - Isabelle Avran, Le Monde Diplomatique

CONTRIBUTORS’ DETAILS

Mohammad Al-As‘ad (1944-2021) was a Palestinian poet, novelist, literary critic and researcher. Born in the Palestinian Mount Carmel village of Umm al-Zeinat, the young poet’s family was forced to flee following the Zionist assault on and destruction of their village in 1948. The Iraqi army transported the young Al-As‘ad and other refugees and survivors from the Mount Carmel villages to Iraq, where he completed his education at the University of Baghdad, and first began writing poetry and literary criticism. He moved to Kuwait in 1967 and began his professional life in journalism and publishing. His poetry and literary criticism appeared in a wide range of Arabic journals and newspapers, and he published a total of seventeen collections of poetry, six literary works, including novels and works of literary non-fiction, and studies in literary criticism and archaeology. He also translated into Arabic Arthur Miller, Kenneth Yasuda and Italo Calvino. His dialogue with the Egyptian-Israeli historian Joseph Algazy, Beyond the Walls (2005) was published by Actes Sud in Paris.

Maia Tabet is an Arabic-English literary translator with five book-length translations to her name. Her work has also appeared in Words Without Borders, Banipal, Fikrun wa Fann, Portal 9, ArabLit Quarterly, and theJournal of Palestine Studies, among others. She is currently completing a translation of Rula Jurdi’s ‘Ilbat al-Daoww.

Anaheed Al-Hardan is an educator and a scholar whose research examines colonialism and anticolonialism in the Arab world. She’s an associate professor of sociology at Howard University. She also leads the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded research program Afro-Asian Futures Past, which investigates African-Asian anticolonialism during the early Cold War, together with colleagues at the American University of Beirut, the University of Ghana, the University of Cape Town and the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of the award-winning book, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards, and co-editor of Anticolonialism and Social Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

MORE INFORMATION

Publication date: 29 September 2026 (UK & North America)
Extent: 120pp
Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)
Rights held: WEL
ISBNs: 978-1-917126-23-6 (paperback) / 978-1-917126-24-3 (ebook)
Price: £14.99 (paperback) / £7.99 (ebook)