The much-anticipated Palestine Book Awards kicked off yesterday evening with a vibrant pre-launch event celebrating the authors and stories that continue to elevate Palestinian history, culture and resistance.
Held at the P21 Gallery in London, the evening drew a full house to engage with the shortlisted authors for the 2025 awards. Hosted by journalist and author Victoria Brittain, the event provided an opportunity to hear directly from the voices behind some of the most powerful recent contributions to Palestinian literature, memoir, history and political analysis.
Journalist and author Victoria Brittain [Middle East Monitor]
The line-up of panellists reflected the diversity and depth of the shortlist, narrowed down from a total of 80 submissions: Azza El Hassan, Dr Dina Matar, Hazem Jamjoum, Peter Shambrook, Matthew Teller, Nada Tarbush (on behalf of the late Mohammad Tarbush), Omar El Akkad, Pankaj Mishra, Prof Tahrir Hamdi, Sarah Aziza and Yousef Aljamal. Across genres and generations, each author explored themes central to Palestine.
The event began with a moment of silence for the 9,250 Palestinian prisoners, including 450 children and 80 women, as well as 3,389 who are currently being held in administrative detention, without cause or without charge.
Author Sarah Aziza [Middle East Monitor]
“A love letter to grandmother and father” were the words used to introduce the evening’s first novel. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders set the tone for a night in which memory, narrative and resistance were repeatedly returned to as both duty and consolation. Speaking about the lens through which she has come to her writing, Aziza recognised that “the loss of Palestine is not only external but internal.” She warned that much can be erased in the telling of refugee stories, yet insisted these histories “are in our bodies and our spirits, whether we recognise it or not.” For Aziza, testimony itself can be an act of love: “the highest act of love can be resistance.”
Professor Dina Matar [Middle East Monitor]
Dina Matar followed with a sustained reflection on cultural production in Producing Palestine. For Matar, the work of making and re-making Palestinian narratives is a temporal project: it continues across generations and refuses erasure. She argued that Palestinians “no longer need permission to narrate” – and must also insist upon who is doing the narrating. Facing what she called a “crisis of representation”, Matar urged that however Palestinian stories are imagined or published, Palestinians must remain at the centre of their telling.
Writer, journalist and broadcaster Matthew Teller [Middle East Monitor]
Matthew Teller spoke about Daybreak in Gaza and the challenge of portraying Gaza as a “living place”. Reflecting on his co-editor, Mahmoud Muna’s experiences at his educational bookshop in Jerusalem, he noted how even simple questions like “How are you?” have become impossible to ask. His aim, he said, was to give space to ordinary life in Gaza at a time when such depictions face increasing resistance, including pushback from UK publishers. Calling out the silence of much of the UK’s media and publishing world, Teller spoke of the “moral urgency of acting quickly, straight away.”
Dr Peter A. Shambrook [Middle East Monitor]
History and archive were the focus of Peter Shambrook, whose Policy of Deceit draws on more than 10,000 photographs and colonial records to scrutinise British mandatory policy in Palestine. Growing up between contrasting national narratives with an Irish father and English mother, Shambrook recorded the correspondence and ideological operations of the period between 1916 and 1939, and cited what he described as a revealing line of policy: that the “centrepiece of British mandatory policy was the withholding of representative institutions in Palestine for as long as there was an Arab majority.”
Tahrir Hamdi – Professor of Postcolonial Literature, Arab Open University [Middle East Monitor]
The evening then returned to the figure of Ghassan Kanafani. Brittain noted that “Kanafani is always with us,” elucidating the ways in which literary and political resistance are intertwined. Indeed, Professor Tahrir Hamdi remarked that Kanafani’s work should be read not just as literature but as political strategy and theory. Hamdi’s remarks emphasised the multiple vehicles of resistance, be they armed or cultural, against settler colonialism and the interconnected logics of western superiority and local reaction. Quoting from Kanafani, Hamdi observed that besiegement does not equal surrender: “the people of Gaza are tougher, they are made of steel.”
Azza El Hassan [Middle East Monitor]
Azza El Hassan’s The Afterlife of Palestinian Images explored a different archival question: what survives violence, and how do survivors and objects continue in the aftermath? After losing personal archives during a 2003 search of her flat in Palestine by Israeli agents, El Hassan set out to trace items and testimonies that endure. By flipping the “archives of disappearance” into an “archive of presence and continuation,” she argued that the act of creating narrative is itself a form of survival. While violence may change people and their objects, they nonetheless remain “usable” and capable of beginning new lives and new stories.
Hazem Jamjoum [Middle East Monitor]
Hazem Jamjoum praised Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s No One Knows Their Blood Type domestic focus. Instead of depicting resistance only as heroic combat, the book examines the everyday relationships around a fighter – who they are to their family, their community, and their home. Jamjoum welcomed its refusal to normalise the horrific and its attention to diasporic complexity: the narrative moves through Amman, Tunis, Beirut, and post-Oslo Palestine, offering a broader, more inclusive Palestinian story that bridges across multiple Palestinian subjectivities. He singled out the novel’s “humour of home” as a powerful coping and survival mechanism, one that is particularly familiar to those who come from communities of struggle.
Yousef Aljamal [Middle East Monitor]
Yousef Aljamal offered a heartfelt tribute to the late writer and teacher Refaat Alareer, lightening the room with witty stories that had the audience laughing aloud. With five of Alareer’s former students present in the room, Aljamal recalled his mentor’s devotion to creating “an army of young writers out of Gaza,” from founding the first English-language website there to offering creative writing classes for free. Even during the genocide, Alareer walked 25,000 steps each day to find access to internet so he could continue writing and challenging disinformation. Killed at 44, Refaat remains a guiding force for his students, whom he always encouraged to become “the best versions of themselves.”
Omar El Akkad [Middle East Monitor]
Omar El Akkad reflected on moral complicity in his One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He spoke bluntly of the dissonance between Western rhetoric and Western action, referring to his home in the US and highlighting how calls for peace by the American government are matched with policies that fund or enable violence.
“The obvious logical endpoint to a system of endless violence has produced the conditions where one must shed the privilege of obliviousness, because you cannot be oblivious to the damage this is doing to your soul,” said El Akkad. This moral rupture, he suggested, forces a reckoning with one’s own position within structures of harm. “By virtue of how my tax money is spent,” he reflected, “I am one of the most violent persons on earth.” As such, for El Akkad, the task of the writer is to “interrogate systems of violence (linguistic, political, and institutional) without which the physical layer of violence could not exist.”
Finally, Pankaj Mishra, who joined online, condemned the “grotesque spectacle” of Western politicians and journalists who, he said, enable atrocities through “moral blackmail we have all been subjected to for decades.” He praised the books discussed throughout the evening, stating they have all “contributed to a sharper, clearer, a morally more liberating perspective on the greatest atrocities of our time.”
The winners of the Palestine Book Awards 2025 will be unveiled in a private function on Friday evening.
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