Mohammed Massoud Morsi is a master storyteller and it is no surprise that the manuscript of his new novel won the prestigious 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award. He brings stories to light that unsettle stereotypes and show unremittingly the fault lines, hypocrisies and ethical dilemmas of lives lived under theocratic systems amid bloody political conflicts.

The Hair of the Pigeon – Mohammed Massoud Morsi (UWA Publishing)

Morsi is particularly acute and convincing when entering the worlds of young men out to prove themselves in situations likely to become far too desperate, deceptive and dangerous for them to survive.

In his previous novel, In the Palace of Angels (2019), a group of young Palestinian men on the Gaza strip head out to buy armaments from Israeli soldiers with a van full of hashish as payment. It can only go badly wrong. Morsi is also committed to the novel as an opportunity to move into the intimate souls of characters, and his portrayal of a Palestinian’s love for an Israeli soldier in this story becomes somehow a source of hope in a time of despair.

The Hair of the Pigeon is a more tightly plotted and intensely focused work. From the first page to the end, we are taken into a vortex of events surrounding the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014, including imprisonment and torture under the Syrian regime and on to the horrors and trials of asylum seekers crossing Europe in the next six years of the novel’s arc.

The central character and narrator is Ghassan, a teenager at the beginning of the novel living as a displaced Palestinian in the Yarmouk camp in........

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