Isabella Hammad’s work spans the past century. Her debut novel, The Parisian, brought readers to Palestine under the British Mandate, and her most recent, Enter Ghost, follows a contemporary production of Hamlet in the West Bank, with a love- and art-hungry protagonist we’re allowed to feel terrifically ambivalent about. In her nonfiction and criticism, Hammad intervenes in politics and culture with clarity, style, and vigor: See her 2024 response to Zadie Smith’s finger-wagging about the student encampments (“Acts of Language,” in the New York Review of Books), or her 2023 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, later published as Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. We can’t wait for her upcoming novel about two women who meet at the anti-colonial conference at Bandung in 1955.
Where are you right now?
Turin. A hotel lobby.
What are you never without?
My notebook.
When and where do you do your best thinking?
In the mornings at my desk. Sometimes a thought might come late at night when I am in bed, so the notebook should be near just in case.
What’s the last project you abandoned?
I don’t think any project is really abandoned … it may just come to life later, in a different form.
Favorite novel?
Impossible question. Today, Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Next week it might be something else.
Favorite smell?
Dry wild thyme, in the heat.
What’s your utopia?
End to military-industrial complex. Also free Palestine, etc.
How are you experiencing gender these days?
Comfortably.
What’s your luxury that money can’t buy?
I was going to say time but actually money can buy time. So instead, friendship. I think good friendship is luxurious.
What do you fantasize about?
I can’t tell you that.
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