Ghassan Kanafani was born on the 8th of April 1936 in Acre, Mandatory Palestine and died on the 8th of July 1972 in Beirut, Lebanon. He was a Palestinian author and a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
Ghassan Fayiz Kanafani was born in 1936 into a middle-class Palestinian Sunni family in the city of Acre (Akka) under the British Mandate for Palestine. He was the third child of Muhammad Fayiz Abd al Razzag, a lawyer who was active in the national movement that opposed the British occupation and its encouragement of Jewish immigration, and who had been imprisoned on several occasions by the British when Ghassan was still a child. Ghassan received his early education in a French Catholic missionary school in Jaffa.
Though prominent as a political thinker, militant, and journalist, Kanafani is on record as stating that literature was the shaping spirit behind his politics. Kanafani's literary style has been described as "lucid and straightforward"; his modernist narrative technnique—using flashback effects and a wide range of narrative voices—represents a distinct advance in Arabic fiction.
In many of his fictions, he portrays the complex dilemmas Palestinians of various backgrounds must face. Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of resistance literature ("adab al-muqawama") with regard to Palestinian writing.
