Rosemary Sayigh

Rosemary Sayigh (née: Boxer; born 1927) is a British-born journalist and scholar of Middle Eastern history. She is known for her works on the Palestinian people, particularly those forcibly displaced to Lebanon as a result of the Nakba.

Personal life Sayigh was born on 15 March 1927 in the United Kingdom as Rosemary Boxer. She is the elder sister of Mark Boxer, a British journalist. Sayigh met her future husband, Yusif Sayigh, while she was working in Baghdad, Iraq as a teacher. The couple married at the National Evangelical Church in Beirut, Lebanon on 7 October 1953. The couple had four children, including scholar Yezid Sayigh.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, Sayigh evacuated from her home in Beirut to stay with her daughter in Cyprus.

Education Sayigh graduated from the University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature in 1948. Sayigh's masters' thesis was about the experience of Palestinians displaced to Lebanon, based on research and interviews undertaken at refugee camps in or near Beirut.

Baghdad, 1952-1953 In 1952, Sayigh's friend Desmond Stewart found her a teaching job at Queen Aliya College in Baghdad, Iraq. The original cover photo was taken by Don McCullin.

Between 1983 and 1993, Sayigh worked with Palestinian women in camps in Lebanon, including Shatila refugee camp, on an oral history project. In 1993, her second book, Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon was published, also by Zed Books. In 1999, she won an award from the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Foundation to travel through Palestine and record women's accounts of displacement. This work forms the basis of "Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement: A Web-based Oral Archive", recorded in Arabic. Sayigh presented a lecture version of the archive to the 15th International Oral History Association Conference in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2010. In 2000, she became a visiting lecturer in oral history and anthropology at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University of Beirut.

Recognition In 2009, the Journal of Palestine Studies published a special issue in honour of Sayigh's work, including an article entitled "A Tribute Long Overdue".

In January 2024, she received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award at the 12th annual Palestine Book Awards (PBA).

Works

Author

Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries; A People's History (Zed Books, 1979) Too Many Enemies: The Palestinian Experience in Lebanon (Zed Books, 1993) Voices: Palestinian Women Narrate Displacement (self-published, 2007)

Editor

Yusif Sayigh: Arab Economist and Palestinian Patriot: A Fractured Life Story (The American University in Cairo Press, 2015) Becoming Pro-Palestinian: Testimonies from the Global Solidarity Movement (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)

Contributor

"Afterword", Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine, ed. Diana Allan (Pluto Books, 2021)