Heba Hayek

Heba Hayek is a London-based writer born and raised in Gaza, Palestine. Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies, her first book, is a collection of remembrances of a girlhood spent growing up in Gaza. Hayek pairs each vignette with a song from a playlist — an artistic choice that echoes the care with which Hayek writes about her memories, which are multi-layered and dreamlike, tender and brutal. In this extract from the book, faded photographs and old wounds drift to the surface of memory as the writer asks what it really means to leave a place behind.