Set in the West Bank, Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost (2023) tells the story of a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Haifa to stage a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank. Isabella uses theater as a metaphor and as a narrative device to navigate the dilemmas of identity, homecoming, and the broader tensions of a Palestinian society living under occupation.

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that she would be interested in the work of Ismail Khalidi, a Palestinian-American playwright and poet.

Ismail’s plays are brought together in his newest book, Until I Return: The Selected Plays of Ismail Khalidi (Bloomsbury, 2025). His early mono-dramas, as well as his newer plays, travel through Palestine’s history and tell stories about the defiant life-affirming practices of its people. He situates the Palestinian play as a register of life and a tool of storytelling able to transcend the limitations and blockades regularly imposed on Palestinian narration.

Ismail's collaborator, the playwright Naomi Wallace writes that “this collection of plays is original, disruptive, and pulls no punches when it comes to staging the human intricacies, not to mention intimacies, of colonialism and war… Here you have a body of work that refuses to trade in easy political rhetoric or clichés.”

In this event, Ismail asks the actor John Early and the filmmaker Hind Shoufani to animate the characters of his plays with a performed reading. Isabella then joins Ismail in conversation.

Co-presented with the Palestine Festival of Literature and the Center for Palestine Studies.