Raja Shehadeh (born 1951) is one of Palestine’s most widely read writers. He is an author, lawyer and public intellectual who co-founded the pioneering Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq in 1979, and has written more than twenty books evoking aspects of daily life in Palestine as well as his own family history. He won the UK’s Orwell Prize in 2008, and was a US National Book Award finalist in 2023. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, Granta and other global media, and is a Royal Society of Literature International Writer. He lives in Palestine.