Each Night I Count My Children
by
Denise Howell (ed)
Publication date
ISBN:
October
2025
978-1-923248-16-8
About the author
Denise Howell (editor) is a Sydney-based counsellor, editor and poet. She lives with her four children in Sydney.
Ahmed Al Qahwaji is displaced, living in a tent east of Khan Younis with his family. He is 23 years old and a graduate in multimedia and web development, who aims to pursue further studies.
Khaled Tolba was a high school student in Gaza before war disrupted his studies. He currently uses digital media as a platform for his storytelling. Khaled supports his younger brother and parents.
Hala Al Khatib is a 20-year-old writer and poet from Gaza.
Asma Abukhatro is a graduate of English and nursing who lives with her parents and two sisters.
Belal Mohammed Yaqoub Al Sheikh Salama is a storyteller and digital content creator. He writes to document what his people are going through.
Fatena Abu Mostafa is a translator, poet and storyteller from Gaza. She studied under the Palestinian poet and activist Dr Refaat Alareer. She passionately seeks to amplify these voices, believing that a voice can spark miracles and serve as a profound call to action.
Jehad Al Farra is the sole provider for his extended family of 20, half of whom are children. He teaches Arabic online and documents Gazan life for a wide audience. During publication, he won a scholarship to study a Masters in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics in Ireland.
Munira El Najar is an English language educator in Gaza and is completing her Masters degree. Her writing centres on motherhood. Munira shares four children with fellow writer, Dr Hassan Abdel Raouf Al Qatrawi.
Dr Hassan Abdel Raouf Al Qatrawi is a psychologist, academic and novelist in Gaza. His writing has appeared in various publications around the world. He shares four children with fellow writer, Munira El Najar.
Shahd Alnaami is a young writer in Gaza who has published her own zine.
About the book
Here are Palestinian voices, defying attempts to carve up our shared humanity. Ranging from emerging to established writers, these contributors come together from diverse backgrounds, reminding us how
(extra)-ordinary we can be in the most horrific of circumstances.
Translated by the writers themselves, their stories are both painfully familiar and unimaginably raw. Deprived of basic resources, a doctor offers hope instead of truth to a pregnant patient with severe anaemia.
A scholar and father grapples with the habituation of grief, while several writers bemoan the world’s silence in what has been declared a genocide.
While many writers in Gaza fly across the vast space of social media, like fiery sparks, this book offers solid ground on which to land and spark anew. These writers allow us to feel their pain, despair, shame, rage and
still, even still, hope and love.
All proceeds from sales of this book by 5 Islands Press are donated to MSF
Here are Gazan voices, defying attempts to carve up our shared humanity. Some of the poems first appeared online, where I collected them, as if precious. I didn’t understand their value then, only that I didn’t want them lost. Indeed, how much attention we pay to these works is how much we believe humanity is worth.
DENISE HOWELL
These poems are partisan for peace and for life and for mothers and fathers and children. For hope and home. Even if you forget the circumstances under which they are written, they are remarkable instances of poetry’s peace-making work, its soul-making, heart-breaking, mind-altering work: the way it has kept humanity (each of us and all of us) sane, made sense of senselessness, taught readers to find their own selves in the faces of the enemy (and the enemy’s victim), to love better for being implicated in both the violence and the resilience. These poems count their children, name their dead, remember the sky and the ramshackle city by the sea; they feed the cats, laugh at calamity, despair and keep going; they give in and cry out and find a way to wake again and refuse to fall silent. They throw soft bombs. They restart the revolution in the heart, which does, in the end, write the end of war.
MARK TREDINNICK