Ziyad Saadi is a Palestinian Canadian writer and filmmaker based in Vancouver. He grew up in Montreal’s West Island and holds a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Concordia University.
Fiction
Three Parties
Toronto: Hamish Hamilton Canada, 2025.
Publisher’s Synopsis (From its website)
A queer Palestinian refugee plans to come out at his elaborate birthday dinner party in this tragicomic modern reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.
Firas Dareer wakes up on his twenty-third birthday with a sense of purpose: today he’ll jump from a Stage 3 to a Stage 6 in his self-determined Coming Out Scale, professing his sexuality to a captive audience of immediate and extended family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and neighbours. But despite the meticulously designed invitations, carefully chosen place settings and floral centerpieces, painstakingly curated playlist, and agonizingly fretted-over menu, factors begin to spin out of his control.
…
As the future Firas has precisely architected for himself slips further out of his grasp, the past comes crashing in like a wrecking ball. Sharp, darkly funny, and full of surprises, Three Parties pays twisted homage to a literary classic, gleefully upends the western coming-out narrative, and sensitively explores the traumas and pressures faced by Palestinian immigrants—all in the span of a single life-changing day.
Awards and Honours
2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (Writer’s Trust of Canada)(Finalist)
Anthologies (Short stories)
Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction
Saadi, Ziyad. “The Third or Fourth Casualty.” In Thyme Travellers, edited by Sonia Sulaiman. Halifax: Roseway Publishing, 2024, p. 19-22.
PN6120.2 .T59 2024
Links
Publisher Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada