Palestinian American Author Sarah Aziza in conversation with Rebecca Mangra

A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back

“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

“The Hollow Half is a book so stunning in style, form, and sentence-level beauty, it feels stitched together with magic. Only a writer of spectacular talent can so masterfully interrogate the vast, diaphanous spectrum of belonging—from generations-deep root systems upended by monstrous injustice, to the most intimate kind of belonging, within one’s own body. Sarah Aziza is an absolutely exceptional writer, and The Hollow Half is an unforgettable debut.” —Omar El Akaad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Sarah Aziza (she/هي ) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of the genre-bending memoir The Hollow Half. Winner of the Palestine Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, The Hollow Half was named a Most Anticipated and Best Book of the Year by Vulture, Vanity Fair, Literary Hub, Elle, Electric Literature, Mizna, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others.

Sarah’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, and The Nation, among other publications, as well as in numerous translations. She is the recipient of fellowships and support from Fulbright, MacDowell, USA Artists, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, and the National Press Club, among others. Having lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, South Africa, and Palestine, Sarah now resides in the U.S. on occupied Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land, where she makes, learns and works towards liberation for Palestine and beyond.

Rebecca Mangra is a Guyanese-Canadian writer and graduate student in literature at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her short fiction, poetry, interviews, and other critical writing have been published in magazines such as The Malahat Review, Room Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and others. She is currently working on her first novel, which has received support from the McCormack Writing Center (formerly Tin House).