‘War lives in me’: Gaza playwright Ali Abu Yasin wins English PEN award

Ali Abu Yasin, honoured for his artistic resilience, has endured Israeli bombardment, displacement and personal loss over the past three years. Save Share London, United Kingdom –Ali Abu Yassin, a playwright from Gaza who continued writing even as Israel’s genocidal campaign devastated the world around him, has won a prestigious award in London. “This prize is great not only for me, but for Gaza, Palestine, and all the Palestinian people,” Ali Abu Yasin, who was named on Thursday as “Writer of Courage 2026” by the literary group English PEN, told Al Jazeera. The 62-year-old began writing plays and mastering the oud as a teenager inal-Shatirefugee camp in Gaza, one of the largest in the Strip and a target of recent attacks. “It’s how I was born, I’ve wanted to express myself using art since my childhood,” he told Al Jazeera. After the war began in October, 2023, Abu Yasin stopped writing plays and instead wrote about life under Israeli bombardment. Abu Yasin said for the first two years, he wrote about the situation in Gaza as Palestinians fled and feared for their lives. “There was no theatre; it was impossible to have a theatre because Gaza was being destroyed,” the writer said, shaking his head. Since 2023, Israel has killed more than 74,000 people in Gaza and the majority of survivors have been displaced several times over. Abu Yasin works with actors who now rehearse their lines in makeshift tents, against the sound of gunfire. “I was near death four, five times. I saw people around me die. We lived by chance, and those who died, died by chance,” Abu Yasin told Al Jazeera. “My son was trapped under rubble; my house was bombed. So, during those two years, I was trying just to provide some safety to my family. To protect them from famine. And to document what was happening, so the world can hear my voice before I die.” After a break, he wrote several screenplays that he hid andcarried with himthroughout displacement. In 2004, Abu Yasin began working with the Said Al-Mishal Theatre, a hub for Palestinian culture in Gaza City that was levelled in a 2018 Israeli bombing. Leading playwrights and theatre directors described the attack as “obliteration of this symbol of Palestinian culture and identity” in a letter to The Guardian newspaper. In 2008, Abu Yasin began writing the Gaza Monologues, a series illustrating life in Gaza, both moments of joy and of pain. A few weeks ago, Abu Yasin left Gaza with the support of an artist residency programme in France......