Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life

Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza asking each one of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. She has selected twenty-six of these narratives to share with the world. Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, who have witnessed what history may one day remember as one of the most savage wars military offensives of our time. Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their stories, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate. The title, Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, is adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing.



Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. She was born in 1970 and studied Arabic literature at Latakia University. Yazbek has been a prominent advocate for human rights and more specifically women's rights in Syria. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the 39 most promising authors under the age of 40 by Beirut39, organized by the Hay Festival. In 2012 she was awarded the PEN/Pinter Prize 'International writer of courage' for her book In the Crossfire, and received the Swedish Tucholsky Prize and the Dutch Oxfam/PEN Prize the following year. In 2022, Yazbek was chosen by the Royal Society of Literature as one of twelve International Writers. Yazbek has published two short story collections, seven novels and four non-fiction literary narratives, and has been translated into over twenty languages.