Recent Books on Palestine (Summer 2024)
Some recent books from and about Palestine:
Fady Joudah’s […] (UK / USA) has been winning prizes and taking the literary world by storm. Joudah is also beloved as one of the great translators of Mahmoud Darwish. And as if that wasn’t enough, he is an emergency room doctor. One of the most important Palestinian writers in the USA today, he is originally from Gaza where over 50 members of his family were killed by an Israeli airstrike in November.
Nasser Abu Srour’s A Tale of the Wall (UK / USA) has been picked up by major publishers in the USA, UK, France and Italy and is a powerful, existential inquiry into meaning and the self, written from inside the cell of a man serving a life sentence in Israel. There are currently no prospects for Nasser Abu Srour’s release. Since October 7th prison conditions for Palestinian prisoners have degraded to an absolutely horrific state with regular reports of rape, torture, starvation. Prisoners are now being routinely denied any kind of visits - whether by family or lawyers but those who do get out are reporting hellish conditions inside.
The tireless Ahmed Alnaouq, co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, has interviewed fifteen Gazans about life and death and collected them in this upcoming book publishing with Unbound: Life & Death in Gaza: Stories of Hope & Resilience.
The Avery Review has new poetry from Gaza in its pages this month, including by our colleagues Maryam al-Khatib and Haidar al-Ghazali.
Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory & Steel (UK) gives a compelling historical analysis of how Israeli universities have long been directly complicit in the colonization of Palestine and the violation of Palestinians’ rights. Since October 7th dozens of universities worldwide have taken different divestment measures from Israeli academia - as you can see by scrolling back through PACBI’s timeline - and we wait now to see what will happen on college campuses in the next academic year.
Three new books that have all come out this summer are Mohammed Tarbush’s memoir, My Palestine: An Impossible Exile (UK); Raja Shehadeh’s brand new What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (UK / USA) and Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab Jew (USA).
In the literary world it’s been encouraging to see serious, coordinated action by authors refusing to be part of complicit cultural work any longer. In the USA, the revulsion at PEN America’s silence on Palestinian writers’ collective murder, led to mass walkout and the collapse of both the annual Literary Awards and the flagship World Voices Festival. We were pleased to stage events in New York and Los Angeles as open calls for any writers to take part in. Both events sold out within days and over 25 authors and actors took part - both will soon be uploaded on to our YouTube channel here.
In the UK the literary story has centered on Scottish asset management company, Baillie Gifford, who - until recently - sponsored a total of nine literary festivals. The author-led collective Fossil Free Books began raising awareness that Baillie Gifford have extensive holdings in oil, gas and Israeli occupation and genocide - and soon authors started withdrawing from the festivals. Within a few days, the scale of disengagement from authors was increasing so rapidly that Hay Festival, and then Edinburgh, announced they would drop their sponsor - since the sponsor clearly would not be pushed to divest, which was what the authors were demanding. A few days later Baillie Gifford cancelled all their sponsorship of all literary festivals. And now we see what will happen next… We’re organising an event on Wednesday July 24th at London’s SouthBank Centre and part of it will be a conversation with three members of Fossil Free Books - and you can get tickets here.