Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the Palestinian author and human rights activist Raja Shahada.

Born in Ramala in the West Bank, his life and writing has been dominated by displacement, struggle, and a search for justice, not least in his quest to uncover who murdered his father.

Aside from chronicling the unhappy history of his family and his homeland, he also co-founded the

Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al-Huck, which monitors and documents violations by all

sides in the Middle East conflict, publishing reports and detailed legal

analysis on its findings. Amid the heavy weight of his work, he somehow has found time to nurture

a glorious garden, growing grapefines and pomegranates.

He says of his work, when you write your thoughts and feelings and emotions, then you can move

on to new ones, otherwise they will keep rotating in your mind and you will go in circles.

So tell me Rajahada as you have chronicled so much of the life of the people around you

through your writing, have you managed to find a degree of clarity about what you think should be happening?

It's a constant challenge, but it's an important challenge to meet because if you're going to live a happy life and a fruitful life, you have to find what gives you comfort and how to manage understanding what is happening and saving

yourself from getting too angry and the right thing I think has helped a lot but also

my garden. There's a front garden which I now have mainly roses because they don't take too much care and shrubs.

And then I have herbs and they're lovely because especially at this time every morning and every lunchtime we make

salads and eat fresh herbs and it's great. You have chosen to stay living in

Ramallah. You've written a lot very successfully about the changing landscape around you.

What does it look like now?

The way it looks is rather sad because many of the lovely hills have been destroyed by settlements and also expansion of Ramallah into the hills but mainly the settlements which are literally on every hilltop.

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