Abdelbari Atwan holds book-signing for memoirs

The Arab Club of Britain and The Association of the Palestinian Community in the UK will host a book signing by Palestinian journalist and editor of Al Quds al Arabi, Mr Abdelbi Atwan's memoir “Country of Words: a Palestinian journey from the refugee camp to the front page" which was released in Arabic and English. The meeting and book-signing will take place this Thursday June 14 at the Posk Police Centre, Macindaw Room, 236-238 King Street, Hammersmith, London W6 0RX In his memoir, "A Country of Words," Abdelbri Atwan recounts with humour and honesty his journey from a refugee camp in Gaza to the front page. The earlier chapters provide an account of the author's parents' forced exile during the nakba and his own childhood spent in Gazan refugee camps. Moving to Jordan, Atwan takes up residence under the stars, sleeping on a hotel roof and scraping a living as a refuse worker and then in a tomato canning factory. Having saved enough to continue his education, Atwan attends university in Cairo and takes part in the student uprisings there in the early 1970s. Beginning his career in journalism, Atwan goes to Libya where his first article is published thanks to Colonel Gaddaffi's feud with the Shah of Iran, thence to Saudi Arabia, and finally London where he is made bureau chief for al-Madina newspaper with an office in Fleet Street. Atwan's first impressions of London range from the comical - his attempts to become more 'westernized' in appearance for example - to the downright alarming. His revelations concerning significant figures from various Islamist 'terror' groups who were living and operating in the British capital at the time, with the full knowledge of the government, seem incredible in the post-9/11 world. London became known as 'Beirut on Thames' in the 1980s and 90s, and Atwan provides a fascinating social anthropological description of the city's many and varied Arab communities. Atwan devotes a whole chapter each to Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat. In 1996 he stayed three days with the al-Qa'ida leader in the Tora Bora mountains and he describes the encounter in vivid detail as well as its aftermath for him, personally and professionally. He had what he describes as a 'love-hate' relationship with the PLO leader and here we find many previously untold personal recollections and anecdotes about Arafat; some hilarious, some deeply moving. Insisting on his right to return to Palestine, where he hopes to be buried, Atwan relates three, sometimes painful and awkward, visits to the Gaza strip in the 1990s and the difficulties faced there by his children, born and raised in London. He identifies the irony of this two-way culture shock, and concludes that he has become a perpetual exile, never truly at home either in London or his native homeland.