Elena Dudum '23 has been awarded a prestigious work-in-progress grant from the Whiting Foundation for her memoir, They Told Me The Way Back Home Would Be Beautiful. The book is forthcoming from One Signal Publishers.
They Told Me The Way Back Home Would Be Beautiful is a memoir in which Dudum examines and reflects upon her Palestinian heritage and being Palestinian in today’s world. The story covers Dudum’s life across the world: California, New York, Ramallah, the Jordan River, and more. As described by One Signal Publishers, "They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful is a necessary call to action against institutional silencing, censorship, and prejudice."
The Whiting Non-Fiction Grant for Works-In-Progress is a $40,000 grant awarded annually to nonfiction writers to support a book in progress. Through the grant, the foundation recognizes both the value of the selected projects and the great cost of time and resources the projects will require. According to the Whiting Foundation, "the grant is intended to encourage original and ambitious projects by giving recipients the additional means to do exacting research and devote time to composition."
The grant's jury had strong praise for Dudum's memoir, calling it "a deeply felt memoir of race and history that defies social erasures of the diasporic Palestinian experience." They have excitedly deemed the work, "the best kind of memoir," citing its agility in weaving "well observed personal narrative with larger matters of global significance." In today’s highly politicized world, the topic demands a "thoughtful, disciplined approach, and Dudum meets the challenge."
Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian writer whose work explores the boundaries of generational trauma and what it means to have an identity shaped by political narratives. As a grandchild of Palestinian refugees, her working memoir hopes to untangle the notion of "homeland" and how one can connect to this amorphous idea in the diaspora. Elena recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in Nonfiction Writing where she also taught freshmen composition. Her personal essays on Palestine have been published in TIME Magazine, Bon Appétit, Cosmopolitan Magazine and The Atlantic.
