Two huge men entered the room. They stood in readiness, in plainclothes. One of them stood to the right and the other to the left. With a signal from his eyes, each seized me by the shoulders, though not roughly. They seized me as if I were some object, easy for them to move. I did not resist when they started to lift me out of my chair.

It was the final day of the fourth Palestine Festival of Literature and I knew it was going to be a long day.

I’m a student volunteer at the festival, and the closing event was to take place in the Silwan Solidarity Tent – a public meeting point in a deeply threatened neighbourhood of my city, Jerusalem – with more than twenty writers from all over the world.

Over the last decade, a new generation of Arabic novelists has been moving beyond the social realism of their predecessors to reach out to the world.