Samar Yazbek

In Fields of Words: Conversations with Samar Yazbek, dir. Rania Stephan, Lebanon 2022, 70 min., Arabic and French with English subtitles

Samar Yazbek is a PEN prizewinning novelist, journalist, and activist from Jableh, Syria. Now living in exile in Paris, Yazbek has been committed to both bearing witness, and documenting the stories of others who have witnessed the atrocities in Syria. In Rania’s film In Fields of Words: Conversations with Samar Yazbek (pictured above), one can feel Yazbek’s experience of this in her words “I’ve become a cemetary”; housing the testimony of the dead.

Yazbek has also founded a women’s organisation in Syria called Women Now, and is a prolific novelist, the latest of which will be published later this year in English. Links and resources to further content below!

Non-Fiction Writing (English language)

Contributed to The Passenger (2021)

Contributed to The Long Walk With Little Amal (2021)

The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (2015)

A Woman In The Crossfire (2012)

Fiction Writing (English language)

Planet of Clay (2021)

Cinnamon (2012)

Media Coverage

Interview with PEN Transmissions

Interview with Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)

Review of Yazbek’s Novel Planet of Clay