Matthew Teller & Mahmoud Muna: DAYBREAK IN GAZA

Kreisky Forum Talks

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Matthew Teller and Mahmoud Muna

DAYBREAK IN GAZA

A year ago, a new era started for Gaza: A war, triggered by the Hamas attack on Israel of October 7th, destroyed most of the Gaza strip. Houses, infrastructure, hospitals, schools – but most importantly: More than 40.000 people. The total destruction of the Palestinian territory, governed by Hamas and inhabited by 2,2 million Palestinians, is a humanitarian and political catastrophe.

As its heritage is being destroyed, Gaza’s survivors preserve their culture through literature, music, stories and memories. Daybreak in Gaza is a record of that heritage, revealing an extraordinary place and people.

Matthew Teller and Mahmoud Muna collected vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers across the generations offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza’s cultural landscape and the breadth of its history. This remarkable book humanises the people dismissed as mere statistics. Daybreak in Gaza stands as a mark of resistance to the destruction, and as a testament to the people of Gaza.

‘A most significant collection, one that frightens, awes and inspires, the timeliest of reminders of our common humanity and the irrepressible force of the written word.’ Philippe Sands

Matthew Teller is a UK-based author and broadcaster writing on place and culture, with a special focus on Palestine and the wider Middle East. His 2022 book Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City was a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. Teller produces and presents documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and World Service, and reports for BBC Radio’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’.

Mahmoud Muna is a writer, publisher and bookseller from Jerusalem, Palestine. He runs Jerusalem’s celebrated Educational Bookshop and the Bookshop at the American Colony Hotel, both centres of the city’s literary scene. Muna writes regularly on culture and politics, with bylines in the London Review of Books and Jerusalem Quarterly, among others.

Tessa Szyszkowitz is an Austrian journalist and author. A UK correspondent for Austrian and German publications such as Falter and Tagesspiegel, she curates Philoxenia at Kreiskyforum and is also a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute in London.