Tareq Baconi: Fire In Every Direction. A Memoir
- €12
- Marino Church, Bantry
- 15/07/2026 - 12:00 pm
Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He will discuss his memoir Fire in Every Direction with Maeve Higgins. It is both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, and it balances humour and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present.
‘In this poignant autobiography, queer Palestinian writer and activist Baconi tenderly explores identity, nationality, and family history… With lyrical prose and shrewd narrative instincts, Baconi transmutes hardship into comfort. Readers will find it difficult not to be moved.’ Publishers Weekly
Tareq will be in conversation with Maeve Higgins
In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life – still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his best friend, Ramzi.
After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past and begin to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalises young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him.
Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.
Writers
Writer
Tareq Baconi
Writer
