Truth, lies, catastrophe — Ahmed Najar brings Gaza’s story to Leitrim

At this year’s Iron Mountain Literature Festival in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ahmed Najar’s presence carried a quiet gravity. A London-based Palestinian writer, playwright, and political economist, Najar has become one of the most eloquent chroniclers of displacement, survival, and the human cost of war. His work bridges journalism and art, memory and politics — a voice shaped by Gaza, yet unmistakably global.

In essays for The Guardian, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye and TRT World, Najar writes with the precision of an analyst and the heart of a poet. His theatre work explores inherited trauma and exile, tracing how conflict transforms the everyday — the objects, rituals, and silences that define ordinary life under siege.

Najar’s forthcoming memoir, Even the Sky Turned Away, continues that thread. It examines what it means to watch one’s homeland from afar: the guilt of distance, the helplessness of witness, the fractures that run through families separated by borders and war. In his prose, time itself feels unstable — “broken,” as he describes it — measured not in days but in ruins, in the slow rebuilding of what violence has undone.

In his recent writing on Gaza, Najar reflects on the world’s habit of returning to familiar figures and failed solutions. He writes of the suggestion that former British prime minister Tony Blair might again be involved in shaping Gaza’s “day after” — and the deep dismay that provokes among Palestinians. For Najar, such gestures reveal how Palestinians are still denied full humanity, still treated as a people to be managed rather than empowered.

His critique goes beyond politics; it is about dignity. Gaza, he argues, does not need another overseer or envoy. It needs recognition of its people’s right to rebuild their own lives, to govern themselves without interference. “What Gaza needs,” he writes, “is not another layer of management but the world to take its hand off our throat.”

As both writer and economist, Najar’s work reminds audiences that catastrophe is never only material. It is psychological, generational — carried in the stories passed down by those who endure. His forthcoming memoir promises to deepen that understanding, offering a witness’s account of memory, exile, and resilience in the face of ongoing devastation.

Through journalism, theatre, and personal reflection, Ahmed Najar gives form to what war tries to erase: the endurance of ordinary people and the insistence on telling their own stories, in their own voices.

When we spoke after the festival, Najar reflected on what it means to write from exile — to live through catastrophe at a distance. “To live through a genocide is obviously a different experience than living in exile,” he said. “You don’t experience the daily horrors, but you experience the worries, the anxiety, the different layers of trauma. No one can actually understand you — it’s a feeling.”

That dislocation, he explained, fuels his work. “Fire, rage, anger — especially when you see what life is by the people around you. Business as usual. People commuting, food on their tables. While you’re on the phone with your family hearing what they’ve been through, what they couldn’t get hold of.”

For Najar, writing is both a release and an act of resistance. “Yes, it makes you a better writer,” he said. “Because you go deeper into everything. You have personal insight into all those characters.” He compares it to the creativity born of historical trauma: “I used to wonder why there are so many good Jewish writers — and now I understand. When you have personal pain in your life, the only way to get it out is on the page.”

Even therapy, he adds, cannot touch that depth. He tried counselling but found himself feeling sorry for the therapist — “because she needed to learn about the Middle East to relate to me.” What hurts most, he says, is the dehumanisation of Palestinians in Western discourse: “It’s all about the narrative. Palestinians die — they’re never killed. The media never say how. But Israeli victims are named, pictured, made human. It makes the killing easier.”

In his recent essays, Najar also challenges the West’s recurring habit of imposing outsiders to “fix” Gaza. Reflecting on talk of former British prime minister Tony Blair’s possible return to the region, he calls it “another reminder that Palestinians are treated as people to be managed, not empowered.” For him, it’s not politics — it’s dignity. “What Gaza needs,” he writes, “is not another layer of management but the world to take its hand off our throat.”

Through journalism, theatre and memoir, Najar transforms rage into art. His work reminds readers that catastrophe is never just material — it is psychological, generational, carried in memory. In Even the Sky Turned Away, he will return to that haunting space between witness and exile, between grief and endurance.

Ahmed Najar writes to reclaim what war tries to erase — the humanity of a people still standing in the ruins, still telling their own story.

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