With his latest book, Pay No Heed to the Rockets, author and journalist Marcello Di Cintio explores the Palestinian experience as seen through the lens of the nation's overlooked storytellers and literary scene. The writer won the $25,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing in 2012 for his book Walls.

Pay No Heed to the Rockets features interviews with poets, authors, intellectuals and booksellers within the West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel and Gaza to take a look at daily life in this region and how, even in the face of protracted and historical conflict, there still exists artistic expression and writing.

In his own words, Di Cintio discusses how he wrote Pay No Heed to the Rockets.

"I have travelled to Israel and Palestine about 10 times since 1999. I have written magazine pieces about my travels and I had a chapter about Palestine in the book Walls. I was looking for a way to write a book-length piece about the Palestinians that didn't hit the politics head on, and didn't start with conflict. A few years ago, I was the writer-in-residence at the Palestine Writing Workshop just outside of Ramallah for a month. I was teaching a creative nonfiction workshop, so I had all these Palestinian writers writing stories that came from their own life experience.

"I was surprised that almost none of the writing was political or necessarily about freedom and occupation. They wrote about family stuff, some stuff that was horrible and some stuff that was funny. But the writing was mostly personal, intimate and domestic. I wanted to hear more about their storytellers and literary culture. I thought, 'Maybe here is my way to talk about Palestine and Palestinians.'"

"I was a bit wary because here in the West we only ever see two kinds of Palestinians. We see the young man with the keffiyeh hurling stones at Israeli soldiers or we see the Palestinian woman on her knees crying in front of a destroyed building. Either militant or victim. What I wanted to reveal was that the Palestinians are complete human beings. I wanted to show that the country is a really beautiful place with warm and gracious people. I wanted to seek out the beauty, as the country isn't known for that."

"From a ideological perspective, I didn't strive for balance. My approach was art, and therefore I didn't feel I needed to always weigh out the other side of the conflict. If the book was about politics, then I would feel more of a pull that way to make the political situation front and centre. But with art, I can just talk about writing, poetry, whatever. But obviously the occupation and conflict is behind everyone's story.

"Instead of making the first question about Israeli checkpoints or the villages that were lost during the conflict, I can ask you about the first poem you wrote. I wanted to show there aren't two sides to a culture. It is all one culture. I think my sympathies are clear — and I don't have a problem with that."