Paola Caridi, essayist and journalist, is a founding member and president of the association of independent journalists Lettera22.

With a degree in Literature and a Ph.D. in History of International Relations, she has collaborated with various publications, including the cultural pages of Sole24Ore, La Stampa, Famiglia Cristiana, local newspapers within the Espresso-Repubblica group, and Limes. She is a member of the editorial committee of the Turin International Book Fair. Since 2016, along with Lucia Sorbera, she has been responsible for the section of the Book Fair program dedicated to Arab Souls, cultures, and avant-garde of the Arab region and its diasporas. She also directs the editorial series La stanza del mondo at Hopefulmonster, an independent publishing house in Turin. As a part-time lecturer at the University of Palermo for the History of International Relations course, she is an individual member of the Istituto Affari Internazionali. In 2008, she was appointed Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy. She has also received the Colombe d'Oro for Peace from the Archivio Disarmo (2013) and the Stefano Chiarini International Prize (2022).

Among her books are Arabi invisibili (Invisible Arabs, Feltrinelli, 2007), Hamas (Feltrinelli, 2009), Gerusalemme senza Dio (Jerusalem without God, Feltrinelli, 2013), Gerusalemme. La storia dell’altro (Jerusalem: The History of the Other, Feltrinelli, 2019). She has also dedicated a theatrical text, Café Jerusalem, to Jerusalem.

Since 2008, she has been managing the blog invisiblearabs.com.

In November 2023, Paola Caridi published Hamas. Dalla resistenza al regime (Hamas: From Resistance to Regime) for Feltrinelli. This new edition provides an updated version of her historical-political research, 14 years after the initial publication, narrating events from the closure of Gaza by Israel and Egypt to the radicalization of Hamas leadership, internal political shifts, and the bloody attack on October 7, 2023.

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