Hidden Companions: A Bilingual Reading with Ahmad Nabil and Fatema Alhashemi
Join us for an Arabic and English bilingual reading and conversation of Hidden Companions by Ahmad Nabil, tracing testimonies of the paranormal from Jerusalem. Nabil and translator Fatema Alhashemi will share stories from the book in Arabic and English, followed by a conversation on translating Palestinian folklore into English.
The Old City of Jerusalem comes alive in Ahmad Nabil’s Hidden Companions, a testimonial and visual archive of Palestinian folklore.
Jinns and ghouls, guardians and tricksters, wizards and possessors. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Unseen beings are a natural element of everyday life. With rich, vivid descriptions and in stunning illustrations, Ahmad Nabil weaves a literary account of paranormal stories: held, shared in whisper networks, relayed over conversations, and passed down as inheritance. This English translation by Fatema Alhashemi traces a captivating world largely unseen in popular narrative.
Hidden Companions is forthcoming on May 21, 2026 from Radix Co-Op in collaboration with the Fiction Council. Artist Jenna Hamed is the lead coordinator of the project in the US.
Please RSVP in advance as space is limited. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
PARTICIPANTS
Ahmad Nabil (b. 1988) is a Palestinian, Jerusalem-based visual artist, researcher, and educator whose practice is deeply focused on documenting encounters with the unseen dimensions of everyday life, as part of Palestinian intangible heritage. He is the founder of The Fiction Council (est. 2015) in Jerusalem, a platform dedicated to Palestinian imagination through the research of Arab and Islamic mythology, superstitions, and paranormal phenomena, and their reactivation through interdisciplinary creative practices. Nabil is the author and illustrator of Hidden Companions: Paranormals from the Old City of Jerusalem, a documentation of supernatural testimonies from Jerusalem. Hidden Companions is available in the US in the original Arabic text and in an English Translation at Radix Co-op.
Fatema Alhashemi is a writer, artist, and translator based in New York City. She has translated several poetry collections, including Remember I Was a Good Man by Ahmed Saleh and Ash and Air by Nadine Murtaja. She is currently writing an Arabic-language short story collection that reimagines global mythology through contemporary characters set in imagined Arab cities.
