Hedaya Saleh Shamun is a Palestinian writer, journalist, researcher, and novelist from Rafah City in the Gaza Strip. She has published three short story collections: “The Fingers of the Soul Precede Me”, “At the Gate of Silence”, and “Daughter of the Sea”. She is also the author of two novels: the first, “Love for You… War for Me”, was released in its first edition in 2011 and its second edition in 2024. Her second novel, “Lamashato and the Jackal”, is currently in press in Cairo.

She is the creator of the Arabic-language media blog “Gaza That Lives in My Memory”
https://faraamaai.org/articles/gaza-fe-khatery.

Hedaya has received multiple awards from the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, the Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sports, and the Emirati newspaper Al-Sada for short stories at the Arab world level. She has participated in numerous cultural evenings in Gaza, Jenin, and Ramallah.

She holds a master’s degree in Media Studies and has authored dozens of research papers in both Arabic and English on gender issues and Palestinian women. She is currently engaged in a literary residency and journalism fellowship at the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University in the United States.

In June 2025, her short story “Shadow of a King” was published in English in World Literature Today, a century-old literary magazine.