Palestine Book Awards 2026 opens with evening of literary celebration in London

The 15th Palestine Book Awards got under way in London last night with a two-hour evening celebrating the authors whose work continues to preserve Palestinian history, land, culture and memory in the face of their erasure.

Middle East Monitor’s (MEMO) annual “Meet the Shortlisted Authors” event at the P21 Gallery drew a full house of readers, academics and activists, who heard shortlisted authors discuss the books, research and inspirations behind this year’s nominated works.

The evening was hosted by author and translator Hazem Jamjoum, who won last year’s Translation Award for his English translation of Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s novel No One Knows Their Blood Type.

Jamjoum was joined by four of this year’s shortlisted authors: Thomas Suárez, whose Palestine Mapped traces centuries of mapmaking and its role in the colonisation of Palestine; Paul Kohlbry, author of Plots and Deeds, a study of how Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank defend their land; Nora Lester Murad, co-editor of Resisting Erasure, which documents the destruction of Palestinian libraries and archives; and Samer Al-Saber, whose A Movement’s Promise is a history of the Palestinian theatre movement that emerged after the 1967 occupation.

Suárez explored how Palestine has featured in European maps over the centuries. He described Zionism and the Israeli state as a marketing project, and examined how a cultural and geopolitical attachment to that project became hardwired in the West. He spoke of an irrational devotion to a cause that is opposed to everything Western societies claim to hold dear, and of the ritual shunning of those who challenge the state’s narrative.

Kohlbry explained why he holds on to the word “peasant”, or fallahin in Arabic, as a category deeply rooted in Palestinian identity. He shared what he had learned from the three villages at the centre of his research in the central highlands of the occupied West Bank, and described the agrarian violation their communities face.

READ: Meet the shortlisted authors of Palestine Book Awards 2026

Lester Murad told a story of destruction and pillage, of campaigns to erase Palestinian knowledge and of the censorship of Palestine in libraries. “Dehumanisation that’s necessary for genocide to happen comes from erasure and misrepresentation,” she said, adding that this happens in libraries too. It was important, she said, not to cede the territory to the censors at a time when Palestinians are holding on to their territory to save their lives.

Al-Saber described how Israeli repression of Palestinian theatre had the opposite effect to the one intended, popularising the very play it sought to suppress. He spoke of cultural resistance as a current running underneath, working in parallel with physical resistance.

Jamjoum also summarised the key arguments of the shortlisted books whose authors could not attend: Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery, Francesca Albanese’s When the World Sleeps, Susan Abulhawa’s Every Moment Is a Life and Adam H. Johnson’s How to Sell a Genocide.

This year’s shortlist of ten titles was drawn from more than 80 submissions, the largest number in the awards’ history. The shortlisted books are How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza by Adam H. Johnson; When the World Sleeps by Francesca Albanese; After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilisation by Hamid Dabashi; Checkpoint 300: Colonial Space in Palestine by Mark Griffiths; Resisting Erasure: Libraries in Palestine and Palestine in Libraries, edited by Mary L. Onorato and Nora Lester Murad; Plots and Deeds: Agrarian Annihilation and the Fight for Land Justice in Palestine by Paul Kohlbry; Book of Wills, edited by Reem Ghanayem; A Movement’s Promise: The Making of Contemporary Palestinian Theater by Samer Al-Saber; Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide by Susan Abulhawa; and Palestine Mapped: From the River to the Sea in Early Geographic Thought by Thomas Suárez.

The winners of the Palestine Book Awards 2026 will be announced at a ceremony in London this evening, with prizes awarded across categories including Academic, Memoir, Edited Books and Anthologies, Global Impact and Counter-Current.

READ: Palestine Book Awards 2025: Winners Announced in London Ceremony