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Palestinian Quebecker YARA EL-GHADBAN is an anthropologist by training but has been writing since she was thirteen. She is the author of three novels, of which I Am Ariel Sharon is the first to be translated into English. In 2017 she won the Canada Council for the Arts’ Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award, and in 2019 she was awarded the Blue Metropolis Literary Diversity Prize. She lives and writes in Montreal. WAYNE GRADY is an award-winning author, translator, and editor. He has won the John Glassco Translation Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award two additional times. His debut novel, Emancipation Day, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. He lives near Kingston, Ontario, with his wife, novelist Merilyn Simonds.
By remaining in the liminal space of coma, I Am Ariel Sharon avoids partisan and political blind spots and addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a perspective that history and analysis all-too-often tend to exclude: the humanity of a man, with all the horror and the light it encompasses. Here resides the great intelligence of Yara El-Ghadban's book, which, taking up and going beyond Spinoza's famous formula, reaffirms that literature can at once laugh, cry, hate, and understand. * Lettres quebecoises * Yara El-Ghadban paints a picture of a country devastated by an ethical shortcoming that affects everyone, Palestinians and Israelis. Through this chorus of female voices and through the character of a nurse who reads to the patient, she calls for wisdom. * TelQuel * [Yara El-Ghadban's] prose forces us to look anew. Readers accustomed to the repetitive stories of textbooks and the media will be transported into the eye of the hurricane and enveloped in the close proximity and conflagration of war ... and carried away by a pen that combines history and feeling with extraordinary panache. Don't wait. Read this book now. * Le Journal des Alternatives * One can only bow before the sensibility and striving for objectivity of someone who writes with extraordinary fluidity and who the stage would do well to discover. * Le Devoir *
