In June last year, ANZ LitLovers reached its ten year anniversary, and among the kind wishes from around the world came a very special gift to mark the occasion, from Kim at Reading Matters in London. The book is Shatila Stories, a slim novella of interlinked short stories which was written in a most unusual way.

Meike Ziervogel explains its genesis in the Introduction. Founder of London-based Peirene Press which specialises in translated fiction, she undertook this ambitious project in Lebanon, where she worked with an NGO called Basmeh & Zeitooneh (“the Smile and the Olive”) to create an authentic story from the Shatila Refugee Camp which was set up for Palestinian refugees in 1949 after the formation of Israel, but is now swollen with refugees from the war in Syria. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, and with the help of London-based editor Suhir Helal, the project ran a three-day creative writing workshop to teach basic story-writing skills to a pre-selected group of participants. The individual stories which resulted were to become subplots woven into a narrative structure devised by Helal and Ziervogel.

The nine participants, aged 18 to 42 wrote under enormous difficulties. The Shatila camp is chaotic, and lawless, governed by opposing Palestinian groups. Attendance was patchy for some participants...

One participant's niece was killed by the low-hanging electrical cables, a grandmother slipped badly in one of the camp's muddy alleys and someone else's father died in Syria. (p.18)

The writing space at the Basmeh and Zeitooneh community centre was cramped and stuffy, shared a wall with a dancing class, and there were no computers, only pen and paper. Some of the writers had never completed formal schooling and quite a few had never read a novel in their lives.

Ziervogel's confidence waned in the face of these difficulties, but she persisted and after the workshops, the participants had six weeks to complete a 4,000 word draft, queuing up at the centre to use WhatsApp on the centre's sole computer to confer with Ziervogel and Helal back in London. The results were four good stories and five interesting drafts and Helal and Ziervogel then returned to work with the writers on these stories and integrate them into a single narrative.

Switching between first and third person narratives, the linked stories provide a vivid picture of life in the camp.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/03/shatila-stories-a-collaborative-writing-proj... ( )

The stories here are straightforward tales interweaving the lives of primarily two families. My rating is more for the efforts of Peirene Press in organizing the writing workshop in Shatila Camp for the novice refugee writers and then the editors/translator who combined the initial stories into a collective narrative. There is both tragedy and hope here. The circumstances are dire but the hope and optimism achieved by even simple things such as the love of music, opportunities of education and work experience shines through.

Peirene Press is currently donating a portion of each book's sales to the Basmeh-Zeitooneh Lebanese Refugee Assistance NGO. See further information at the Peirene Press website. ( )