Ghassan Kanafani

Born in Acre in 1936 and exiled to Lebanon in 1948, he invented much of Palestinian fiction. Men in the Sun (1963) and Return to Haifa (1969) are the standards; the second asks what return means when the other family has lived in your house for a generation.

He was killed in July 1972 by a car bomb in Beirut, along with his niece. He was thirty-six.