Many years later, another young woman in Ramallah sets out to discover the events surrounding this heinous act, dubbed a 'minor' crime in present-day, which happened 25 years to the day before she was born. Shibli's latest novel is set across two time periods and revolves around a brutal crime committed during the summer of 1949 in Palestine, when Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, including a teenage girl, who is raped, killed and buried in the sands. She has been a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, Palestine.

Shibli, who lives between Jerusalem and Berlin, has a PhD from the University of East London and has dedicated much of her time to academic research, too. While she has written three Arabic novels, Shibli has also worked on plenty of non-fiction, including art book Dispositions and an edited collection of essays called A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialogue with Edward Said. She's won the A M Qattan Foundation's Young Writer of the Year Award twice: once in 2001 for her novel Masaas, which was translated into English by Paula Haydar as Touch, a novella that centres on a girl who's the youngest of nine sisters in a Palestinian family and again in 2003 for Kulluna Ba'id bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub, translated by Paul Starkey as We Are All Equally Far from Love, about teenage post office worker Afaf, who discovers a mysterious set of love letters. My quest in the case of Palestine is not to be concerned with anyone who cares about positioning, but those who are suffering

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