2026 - Ghayath Almadhoun
Ghayath Almadhoun (1979) is a Syrian-Palestinian-Swedish poet in exile whose work has been translated into dozens of languages.
Ghayath Almadhoun was born in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus to a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother. In 2008, he fled to Sweden.
In 2025, he was a guest at the tenth edition of the Passa Porta Festival as one of the leading international authors. In 2026, the English translation of his innovative poetry collection I Have Brought You a Severed Hand by Catherine Cobham was awarded the National Translation Award for Poetry by the American Literary Translators Association.
During his residency at Passa Porta, he is working on a collection featuring new poetic forms that respond to the profound upheavals shaping the present. To this end, he is seeking a language in which the personal and the historical, as well as themes such as exile and geography, intersect.
He will also be in conversation with Flemish poet and essayist Charlotte van den Broeck at the Crossing Border Festival in Antwerp (8 November) and will be giving a reading in Brussels during the VUB’s Compassionate Week (18 November).