Ottawa Writers Festival Requiem for Gaza with Chris Hedges Hosted by Yipeng Ge

Join Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges for a taste of his latest publication, Requiem for Gaza. In a profound and elegiac work of investigative journalism, he and the cartoonist Joe Sacco collaborate to present the testimony of displaced Palestinians.

In the spring of 2025 the cartoonist Joe Sacco, author of Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and Chris Hedges, the former Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, traveled to Cairo where they interviewed 29 Palestinian families who had recently left Gaza. In Requiem for Gaza, they use the experience and stories of these families to detail the crucible of the genocide, the loss of homes and communities, the appalling death toll among friends and loved ones, the constant displacement, the terror of indiscriminate killing, the hunger and deprivation, and the obliteration of all that was known.

Requiem for Gaza, like their New York Times best seller Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, combines comics and single images drawn by Sacco within the narrative written by Hedges. Hedges’ vivid prose and Sacco’s visceral images complement each other and together paint a portrait of dignity and suffering under genocide.