Palestinian Diaspora in Chile is a conference and conversation with Chilean writer and scholar Lina Meruane, who teaches Latin American Cultures, Arts, and Cultures, and is affiliated to the M.F.A. in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU.

The conference features an unpublished essay on the Palestinian community in Chile, which is the largest outside the Middle East, with approximately 400,000 people of Palestinian origin, including Meruane herself.

In 2013, Lina Meruane published Volverse Palestina [Becoming Palestine], which was expanded in 2021 and republished as Palestina en pedazos [Palestine in pieces]. In it, she digs into her family story of migration to Chile and the awakening of her identity through a trip back to Palestine, her grandparents' land.

Since 1998, she has authored a short-story collection, a play and five novels. Sangre en el ojo, was awarded the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize (Mexico) in 2012 and has been translated into English, Italian, German, Dutch, French and Portuguese. Meruane has also received the Anna Seghers Prize (Berlin, 2011) and Calamo Prize (Spain, 2016), as well as literary fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (US 2004), the National Endowment for the Arts (US 2010) and the DAAD Artists in Berlin Program (Germany 2017). Her essay-books include her scholarly work on the impact of AIDS in Latin American literature, Viral Voyages (Palgrave McMillan, 2014), a chronicle on her Palestinian origins, Volverse Palestina (Becoming Palestine, 2014) and a short essay book, Contra los hijos (Against Children, 2014).