Writing
The Hair of The Pigeon is my second novel. It won the Dorothy Hewitt Award for best unpublished novel in Australia in 2026 and has been endorsed by several renowned journalists, authors and thinkers. My heartfelt gratitude to Anthony Lowenstein, Tony Birch, Samah Sabawi, Sara Saleh, Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Arif Anwar, B.P. Marshall, Gillian Mosely, Katherine Johnson, Michelle Johnston and Rohan Wilson. Also the award judges of the Dorothy Hewitt Award in 2026: Professor Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, UWA Chair of Australian Literature, Kate Pickard, UWAP publishing manager, James Jiang, Sydney Review of Books editor, and WA poet Caitlin Maling. Thank you and for choosing The Hair of The Pigeon as the winner of the 2025 Dorothy Hewitt Award.
Thank you for acknowledging my work.
Special thanks goes to Dr. Arif Anwar, author of The Storm, for asking me to join him and a talented group of writers at The Hermitage Residency in Srimangal, Bangladesh in 2023. I would not have met my once in a lifetime agent, Anjali Singh, had it not been for Arif. The Hair of The Pigeon could have still been on the shelf if it wasn’t for the inspiration and love we all shared that week. Thank you Arif, for creating that beautiful space where us writers and thinkers from our part of the world, could come together and listen, create and learn. Thank you for challenging the cultural hegemony which assumes that such a gathering of minds and talents could only happen in a western metropolis.
“The Hair of The Pigeon takes us into the world of Syria in a time of crisis, a nation burned by despotism and violence. The people so desperately crave normality but are unavoidably dragged into a war they don’t want. With Morsi’s ear for dialogue and eye for the human touch, this work shows the power of the novel to transcend the often-transient nature of the media cycle.”
– Antony Loewenstein, journalist, filmmaker and author of The Palestine Laboratory
If you can’t read the reviews below, simply zoom in on the page.
The Hair of The Pigeon is published in the USA, by Robert R. Godine, in June 2026
“With the lilt and grace of Arabic overlaying his English, Morsi’s prose vibrates with an intensity that animates this arresting tale of love, interminable loss, and sumud in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. A haunting and necessary novel for our time.”
– Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home
The Third Edition of The Palace of Angels is published as a single book triptych, with the addition of an author’s note, by UWAP in 2026:
“This is a book about love, though at first it may appear to be a story of ancient hatreds. Slowly, and with big-hearted charm, Morsi creates a world in which love is the only antidote to fear.”
– Sisonke Msimang – Activist, Storyteller and author of Always Another Country and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela
I did not think my heart could both break and soar any more over my father’s homeland. I did not think I had more tears or laughter. And yet Mohammed Massoud Morsi’s The Palace of Angels took me by surprise. It moved me deeply, reminding me of the power of story-telling to reveal how living under occupation packages the absurd and the tragic, despair and compassion, into individual and collective lives. Morsi is a tremendous story-teller who pulls off this ambitious, big work because he pays attention to the details, treating his characters with tenderness even at the moments when the reader thinks they least deserve it. This is a book to be read and re-read.
–Randa Abdel-Fattah, academic, advocate for Palestinian rights and author of Discipline
The First Edition of The Palace of Angels was published as a triptych in continuation of What Is Past Is Dead and Twenty Two Years To Life, published by Living In The Strange (Copenhagen) in 2018:
Ilan Pappe was one of the first to read it and said:
Twenty-two Years to Life is a moving and heartbreaking tale based on a true story. It brings new meaning both to steadfastness and the human suffering within the mega prison of the Gaza Strip. The level of the occupier’s cruelty is matched by the fragile humanity of the occupied––in a way that can only be appreciated with the personal narrative so beautifully spun. The human complexity turns and twists and is then exposed in this powerful tale of the clash between love and hate, revenge and compassion, within an impossible and abnormal reality of occupation, colonisation and ethnic cleansing. The Palace of Angels is a gripping tale that challenges our preconceived ideas and identities.
– Ilan Pappe – Historian, political scientist, and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
The Second Edition of The Palace of Angels was published as a single book triptych, by Wild Dingo Press in 2019:
“Vital, brutal and tender, The Palace of the Angels is written with the urgency of breaking news and the delicacy of poetry. This is Morsi at his passionate best.”
– Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prizewinner
A tender, intimate and compelling collection of stories, The Palace of Angels will take you on surprising and devastating explorations of love and life, distilling the true cost of tragedy, oppression and unrealised potential.
Mohammed Massoud Morsi does not undermine the brutality of a life lived under occupation, but he offers a rare narrative: one that does not merely glimpse our humanity, but breaks it open to expose the bones of how we live and connect, and how our failure to do so affects us all.
Morsi is a masterful storyteller, whose elegant and vivid prose beautifully captures what it means to live rather than simply exist, holding a mirror up for the reader to recognise the connections between all things.
Amal Awad
With all the sympathy one might feel, it is impossible for an outsider to imagine what it is like to be a Palestinian living in the West Bank or Gaza today. Morsi affords one a revealing glimpse.
– Daniel Gavron
The Palace of Angels was hurting, shaking, made me dizzy and uncomfortable, gave me hope and filled me with despair, all at once.
– Kobi Tuch
Morsi, writing with tremendous empathy, has distilled a political conflict into a very human, visceral story. The dichotomy between love and oppression echoes through this powerful narrative, taking the reader on a shifting journey between the delicate and the devastating.
– WritingWA
What is Past is Dead is about desperate actions we sometimes take to counter desperate events. The best thing about this novella: it is an intimate portrait of one man’s life. Had Morsi painted this work on a bigger canvas, it would not have worked nearly so well as what he has done instead, which is to present us with a very fine cameo.
– T.D. Whittle