Life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is often stalked by violence, heightened by the events following 7 October. When US journalist Nathan Thrall decided to write about their experience, he wanted to unveil the sheer catastrophe that they live through daily. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book, ‘A Day in the Life of Abed Salama’, focuses on Abed whose son died in a bus crash in 2012, and the other individuals linked to the tragedy. Speaking to Georgina Godwin, Thrall shares the relationships he has with Salama and others, the reaction to their story and the Israel-Hamas war. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, this is Meet the Writers.
I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today is a Pulitzer Prize winning American author, essayist and journalist.
His work's been featured in the likes of the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, London Review of Books, plus many others and has been translated into more than two dozen languages.
He also spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, the non profit organization working to prevent wars and shape the world in a peaceful aspect, where he led the Arab Israeli Project as direct.
His writing has been cited by the United Nations Security Council, the General assembly, the Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
His latest book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, was named best book of the year by the New Yorker, Time, The Economist, and 15 other publications.
It also won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction this year.
Nathan Thrall, welcome to Meet the Writers.
It's such a pleasure to be with you.
I have been so looking forward to this interview.
I read your book and it was like a veil had been lifted.
Suddenly I understood what the day to day life was like for people living in the occupied West Bank.
I don't think that I really had any real sense of it.
And you have told this story in such an incredible way that I challenge anybody, walk away from it without feeling profoundly changed.
And I can quite see why you won all those prizes.
I'm really, really keen though to find out what was the making of the man that gave us this book.
So tell us about your childhood.
Well, I grew up in California and I was born to a family of Soviet emigres who came a few years before I was born.
And like many Soviet Jews, they were quite secular and they believed that they were Democrats when they arrived in the United States because the Democratic Party and many American Jews who were Democrats embraced them and were at the forefront of the cause of bringing Soviet Jews out of the Soviet Union.