Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up. Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city's form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as 'the exporter of oranges and short stories'. This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called 'the largest prison in the world'.

Celebrating the first ten years of the Writers in Translation Programme Writers in Translation, established in 2005 and supported by Bloomberg and Arts Council England, champions the best literature from across the globe. To mark the programme's tenth anniversary, English PEN and Pushkin Press present Life from Elsewhere: Journeys Through World Literature - ten new essays by leading international writers, with an introduction by award-winning novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. These illuminating, invigorating pieces reflect on the question of identity, both personal and political, in a many-frontiered world. Alain Mabanckou writes on how the Congo remains his umbilical cord, Andres Neuman on growing up in Argentina, Chan Koonchung on the impossibility of defining China, Israel's Ayelet Gundar-Goshen on a meta-fictional encounter between writer and translator, Samar Yazbek on post-revolutionary Syria, Asmaa al-Ghul on how every experience in Palestine is linked to occupation, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi on the defiance of literature in the face of Iran's revolution, Hanna Krall on the lasting effects of the Holocaust in Poland, Andrey Kurkov on the dead and living languages of the Caucasus, and Turkey's Elif Shafak on the necessity of a cosmopolitan and diverse Europe.