In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. From these encounters comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a bombing, the book s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans. That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated and mechanisms of cruelty that defy comprehension. In gathering these testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and the survivors determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.
About the Author
Samar Yazbek, born in 1970, is a Syrian writer and journalist. A prominent advocate for human and women s rights, she took part in the 2011 popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. She was named one of the Beirut39 most promising authors under the age of forty in 2010 and was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize International Writer of Courage Award in 2012, followed by the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize. In 2022, she was selected as one of twelve International Writers by the Royal Society of Literature. Yazbek has published two collections of short stories, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has been translated into over twenty languages.
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature three times: in 2024 for her translation of Samar Yazbek s Where the Wind Calls Home; in 2021 for her translation of Samar Yazbek s Planet of Clay; and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa s Death is Hard Work, which also won the 2020 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.
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