Ghassan Kanafani

Kanafani was born in Acre and fled with his family to Lebanon and then Syria during the 1948 Nakba, an experience of dispossession he spent the rest of his short life turning into fiction, journalism, and political organizing. He worked as a teacher, illustrator, and editor for Palestinian and pan-Arab newspapers while becoming a leading spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Men in the Sun (1963), his first novel, follows three Palestinian refugees who pay a smuggler to hide them in an empty water tank on a truck crossing the desert into Kuwait in search of work: a parable of exile whose ending indicts not just circumstance but the refugees' own resignation. He went on to write further fiction and literary criticism, including early studies of Palestinian resistance literature.

In 1972, a car bomb planted by Israeli intelligence killed Kanafani and his young niece outside their Beirut home, in retaliation for an attack attributed to the group he represented; he was thirty-six.