Odeh Bisharat

Odeh Bisharat was born in 1958

Odeh Bisharat was born in 1958 in Yafa an-Naseriyye. His family had been displaced from Ma'alul, an Arab village destroyed in the 1948 war. As a young man he was active in the communist youth movement.

He headed the national committee of Arab high school students and the Arab students' committee at the University of Haifa. He earned a doctorate in biology.

Bisharat became a high school teacher and edited the Arabic youth magazine Al-Ghad. He served as secretary general of Hadash and writes a weekly column in Haaretz. He sits on the boards of Adalah and the New Israel Fund.

He has written several novels, including The Streets of Zatunya and Dunya, which deal with the 1948 expulsion and flight. In 2016 he was a resident of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. He was a resident author at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies from 2023 to 2024.

Bisharat is married with two sons and a daughter. He lives in Yafa an-Naseriyye.