Death-Defying Poetry

Haia Mohammed is a 22-year-old poet and artist from Khan Younis whose work explores memory, land and the intimate textures of survival, often weaving personal witness with collective history. Her debut pamphlet, , published last year by Out-Spoken Press, was praised by the for its ‘candid honesty and bravery, documenting the physical and spiritual life of a poet threatened with death [every day]’.

Her poems ‘are full of pain and defiance, grief and joy,’ says the Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck. ‘They refuse to be reduced to one emotion, one reality.’

Max Porter has written: ‘Haia Mohammed’s poems feel to me like the most important work being written in the world today. They are staggeringly impactful in their honesty, strength and beauty. The people of Gaza, as Haia says, are different: they write poems that defy death. These pieces are miracles of language and spirit, they are humanity at its best and most resilient.’

Haia has won a full scholarship to study creative writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was one of the first group of scholars successfully evacuated from Gaza to the UK last year.

Max Porter FRSL is a multi-award-winning novelist, as well as a published poet. Two of his novels, (2015) and (2023) were made into films released in 2025: respectively, The Thing with Feathers (starring Benedict Cumberbatch) and Steve (starring Cillian Murphy).

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Bath Friends of Palestine