Ghassan Kanafani was one of the most prominent figures in Palestinian cultural and political history. Born in Akka in 1936, he became a refugee in Damascus, Syria in 1948 among thousands of other Palestinians. During his time in Syria, he worked as an art teacher at one of the UNRWA schools there. He moved to Kuwait in 1956. Kanafani was involved in many publications during his lifetime, as a writer and an editor, where he shared his stories. Ghassan left Kuwait to Beirut in 1960. He was part of the Arab Nationalist Movement and later became one of the founders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in December o1f 1967. In 1969, he became their official spokesperson and editor of their publication until his assassination in Beirut in 1972. The Israeli Mossad placed an explosive bomb in his car, which killed him and his niece.

Ghassan Kanafani’s works, including Men in the Sun and Returning to Haifa have been considered some of the most important works of Palestine and the Arab world, both turning into films after his death. His writing is incredibly poignant and thought provoking, often carrying more questions than answers for his readers.

“Ghassan Kanafani was a political activist who was deeply committed to the cause of Palestine; a man of letters; an accomplished artist; and one of the most prominent Arab novelists and modernist playwrights of the second half of the twentieth century. In his early literary writings Palestine was depicted as a cause in and of itself. Later on he came to see in Palestine a total human symbol whereby his stories and novels dealt not merely with the Palestinians and their problems but also, and through the figure of the Palestinian, the human predicament of agony and deprivation.” —Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Question