TPAN

Join TPAN for a special edition of Kitaab club, hosting the author of Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family.

Kitaab Club is a book club centred on Palestinian literary excellence.

Cost: Free, but books sourced at own cost

Run time: 2 hours

Capacity: 25 participants

*We recommend that participants have finished at least 80% of the book by the meetup date in order to affectively engage in discussions. There is no rule on how you read the book (physical, e-book or audiobook are all acceptable forms of reading)

Where to get it: 

Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is currently for sale at Five Leaves Left and other local bookshops and online retailers.

There are copies available through Libraries Tasmania.

There are also ebook versions available.

About Find Me at the Jaffa Gate by Micaela Sahhar

This is a genre-defying book - in the words of Randa Abdel-Fattah: It is a memoir written by a poet, poetry written by a novelist, literature written by an academic.

‘If we were different people, to write down these words might be to leave them behind us. But words are our artifacts, and I am seeding a trail for the journey, home.’

What does the daughter of a Nakba survivor inherit? It is not property or tangible heirlooms, nor the streets and neighbourhoods of a father’s childhood and the deep roots of family who have lived in one place, Jerusalem, for generation upon generation.

Fixing her gaze on moments, places and objects – from the streets of Bethlehem to the Palestinian neighbourhoods of the New Jerusalem – Micaela Sahhar assembles a story of Palestinian diaspora. Find Me at the Jaffa Gate is a book about the gaps and blank spaces that cannot be easily recounted, but which insists on the vibrant reality of chance, fragments and memory to reclaim a place called home.

It has also won the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026, Non-Fiction, as well as being shortlisted for numerous other literary awards.

About Micaela Sahhar

Micaela Sahhar is an Australian–Palestinian writer and educator living on Wurundjeri Country. Her essays, poetry and commentary have appeared in Cordite, Meanjin, Overland, Rabbit and Sydney Review of Books, among others. She is a Wheeler Centre Next Chapter Fellow (2021), a grant recipient from the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund (2022), and was commended for the Peter Blazey Fellowship (2024).