Palestinian poet in exile Ghayath Almadhoun will present his award-winning literary work for the first time in the Czech Republic in an interview with writer and journalist Jonáš Zbořil.

Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian poet and artist born in Damascus to a Palestinian family displaced from Ashkelon. He left Syria in 2008 and settled in Sweden, and he currently lives between Berlin and Stockholm. His work combines themes of exile, memory, war, and displacement with personal experiences and political reflections. He is the author of five poetry collections, and his work has been translated into nearly thirty languages. In addition to writing, he also creates experimental poetry films and collaborates with artists, musicians, and scholars. His latest collection, I Have Brought You a Severed Hand (2025), has already been translated into German, Dutch, Portuguese, and Norwegian. In it, he intertwines personal loss with the history of violence, war, and displacement, drawing on surrealist imagery, irony, and dark humour. Almadhoun is considered one of the leading voices in contemporary Arabic poetry.

Jonáš Zbořil is a Czech writer, poet, and journalist. He studied Czech and English at Charles University’s Faculty of Education. He made his literary debut in 2013 with the poetry collection Podolí, which was nominated for the Jiří Orten Award and the Magnesia Litera Discovery of the Year. He followed this up with the collection Nová divočina (New Wilderness, 2020), and in 2024 he published his prose debut Flora, a dystopian novella about parenthood, nature, and humanity’s changing relationship with the world around us. The translation rights to the book have been sold in nineteen languages, including English, German, and French. Zbořil’s writing is characterised by an intimate, down-to-earth style that connects everyday experience with environmental and existential themes. He previously worked for a number of years at the Czech public radio station Radio Wave, where he hosted the literary programme Liberatura. He is currently the editor of the culture section of the news website Seznam Zprávy.