Winner of the 2025 Dorothy Hewitt Award, Mohammed Massoud Morsi’s The Hair of the Pigeon is an epic tale of exile, survival, and indestructible love, tracing a path from the atrocities of the Syrian civil war in a Palestinian refugee camp, the Arab Spring, across the Mediterranean, to present-day Copenhagen.
Ghassan grows up a free spirit among the constrained lives of the displaced in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, Syria.
His best friends are Badawi, who is all football, fists and fast-money schemes, and Sama, the girl whose eyes mirror the sky.
The ghosts of time, life and death remain hidden, but when the Arab Spring ignites a wave of protest and hope across the region, the drums of war begin to thunder, and devastating secrets rise to the surface.
Sama is the first to disappear. The government’s brutal crackdown against dissent shatters their fragile world. Ghassan vanishes into one of Assad’s notorious prisons, where he is tortured mercilessly and barely survives.
When he emerges from the underground, he finds Yarmouk camp under siege, his home in ruins, his mother changed, and his father dying. As fighters and civilians starve in a camp sealed off from the world, the truth of the past unravels.
“In the tangled streets of millennial Damascus, Ghassan and Sama are childhood friends. As they grow into adulthood in the convulsions of the Arab Spring, violence erupts intimately into their lives. The fatality of these days, between regimes and in the shadow of violent expulsions, plays out with the precision of a primal scene. This gripping novel speaks powerfully to the moment we are in.” – 2025 Dorothy Hewett Award judges
Mohammed Massoud Morsi is an Egyptian-Danish-Australian photographer, journalist and writer. His work has been published in all three of his traditional languages. Morsi discovered journalism made people yesterday’s news and turned to writing novels instead.
He has a talent for reaching to the heart of existence in a complex world and looks to important questions, finding that which is quintessentially human within much broader struggles.
His work is enriched by his photographer’s eye for detail and a passion for speaking out for those suppressed, challenging and breaking common narratives all at once. UWA are publishing Morsi’s debut novel, The Palace of Angels in May. The Hair of the Pigeon is his second novel.
The Hair of the Pigeon is published by UWA Publishing and is available from all great booksellers.
Image: The Hair of the Pigeon – courtesy of UWA Publishing