Saleem Haddad’s debut novel, Guapa (Europa Editions, 2016), was published to great acclaim and drew him devoted fans around the world. Ten years later he returns with the hugely anticipated, Floodlines (Europa Editions, 2026). Yasmin Zaher burst onto the scene with The Coin (Footnote Press, 2024), an entirely original novel that caught attention everywhere from BookTok to the Dylan Thomas Prize. They got together to talk on the PalFest Podcast and we’re presenting an edited version of their conversation here for you.
SALEEM: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I read The Coin this year and I think it was one of the best books that I’ve read, definitely this year, if not for the last few years.
YASMIN: And I read Guapa when it came out in 2016, which was the year when I started writing The Coin. And I read it as an inspiration really for what you can do as an Arab writer, writing in English, kind of being a little bit transgressive as well.
SALEEM: That means a lot. I wonder if a good place to start our conversation is to pick up on something you wrote in an essay that was published in January 2024, I think, in The Drift. The essay was called “Abolish the Categories.”
A few writer friends sent me this essay wanting to get my thoughts and it really prompted a lot of conversations. And rather than me trying to summarize what the essay said, I wonder if you can just tell me a little bit about what you were preoccupied with in the essay.
YASMIN: Oh, interesting. So, yeah, I think, well, the categories kind of refer to literary categories, right? And the idea, I think, came to me from trying to organize my bookshelf, like trying to organize the fiction in my bookshelf.
And the way I do it naturally, for some reason, is based on geography. So I will do like Middle Eastern literature, African literature, literature from East Asia. And then I thought about myself and like where I would fit.
And I didn’t quite, you know, I am a Palestinian writer, but I write in English. So I was like putting myself at the edge of the category. And yeah, just thinking about these terms of, you know, who we are as writers and how that defines us and feeling very strongly that I don’t necessarily fit in any of those categories, which I think you probably have a very similar experience, just by virtue probably of being from different countries.
SALEEM: Definitely. My background is very mixed and I grew up in a lot of different countries. So I always find myself not entirely fitting into a certain category, especially when, as is often the case with literature, it’s by nationality.
Technically, I could fit into three of those, Lebanon, Jordan, and British. But I wouldn’t categorise my writing as any of those things. And whereas Guapa was not really set in a particular country my next novel is very much rooted in Iraq – but I still feel quite strange about it being considered an Iraqi novel.
YASMIN: Right, and I feel strange about The Coin being considered a Palestinian novel because it takes place in New York, first of all, and also because its main character is so unrepresentative of Palestinians in a way. Like, she’s rich, she’s promiscuous, she’s not under any control of the patriarchy. And, yeah, it’s hard to belong, but it’s almost like you love your culture, but you feel like it doesn’t love you back, like you don’t belong in that box, you know? That’s something that I struggled with a lot while publishing.
SALEEM: While publishing or while writing?
YASMIN: While writing I was in my secret chamber where I wasn’t thinking about anyone, I wasn’t thinking about audience, I was in my madness. But then when it came time to go out there, to be vulnerable, to be judged, really, like so much of publishing is about being judged, then I started to have a lot of anxieties around that.
SALEEM: Where did you find The Coin fitting in? Not by you, but by readers and publishers. Was it sold as a Palestinian novel?
