Ghassan Zaqtan is one of the most original and compelling Palestinian poets of his generation. A novelist, editor, playwright and filmmaker, he has written ten books of poetry, including Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. The Silence that Remains introduces readers in the UK for the first time to Zaqtan’s early work, including his debut collection destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Writing about personal memory as a form of political and social activism, while avoiding the mythology of exile and displacement, Ghassan creates an aesthetic of fragments, an imaginative archaeology of fragile human subjects. It’s a book about the silence of the tongue and the silence of the heart, the silence of resistance and the resistance of silence.