Palestine Festival of Literature 2026 – Ramallah and Gaza City
Announcing our 2026 public program in Palestine with events coming up in Ramallah and Gaza City starting today: Monday October 26th.
Artwork by Fahed Shehab
We have a terrific slate of programs lined up in Palestine over the coming period featuring Fred Moten, Doreen St Félix, Dalia Taha, Nesrine Malik, Layan Kayed, Lena Meari, Jehad Abu Dayya, Hala al-Zanaty, Hassan al-Bawab, Brandon López, Yazan al-Khateeb, Iman Mersal (online), Mariam al-Khateeb (online) and more.
As always, all our events in Palestine are free and open to the public, with simultaneous translation will be available between Arabic and English. We will record the events and post clips online.
Between absence and presence: Nesrine Malik and Layan Kayed on Sudan and Palestine
Monday, October 26, 7:30 pm at the Khalil Sakakini Center
How do Palestine and Sudan see and speak to, and about, one another? In what ways do their experiences and struggles intersect and diverge? How do we understand these connections in the context of regional politics and imperialisms today?
Join us for our opening event of this week’s program in Palestine, with author and columnist Nesrine Malik, and researcher Layan Kayed.
Resisting Capture: Lena Meari and Fred Moten in conversation
Tuesday, October 27, 7:00 pm, co-presented with Birzeit University at the Khalil Sakakini Center
How does incarceration extend beyond prison walls to become a system that governs bodies, knowledge, and public space? Fred Moten and Lena Meari will explore the tools that seek to reclaim sites of learning, freedom, and collective action.
Reflections and music
Thursday, October 29, 6:30pm at the Khalil Sakakini Center
From Dalia Taha, Doreen St Félix, Brandon López, Fred Moten, Nesrine Malik, and more.
Book Launch: There is a City
November 17th, al-Qattan Cultural Center, Gaza City
We are honored to co-organize this launch event for There Is A City, a new collection by a group of poets in Gaza and in forced exile with Jehad Abu Dayya, Mariam al-Khateeb (online), Yazan al-Khateeb, Hala al-Zanaty, Hassan al-Bawab.
We are hopeful that the event can be livestreamed, which we will share details of when possible.
In this week’s Dispatch:
Noura Erakat and John Reynolds in London;
The full video of On Freedom with Tareq Baconi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nesrine Malik;
A curated calendar of upcoming Palestine-related events worldwide;
Sama’an Ashrawi’s Baba Was a Rolling Stone is Book of the Week;
Your weekly media roundup.
The 2026 Festival Poster
London, November 17: Confronting Zionism with Noura Erakat, John Reynolds, and Rafeef Ziadah
An unmissable opportunity to hear from Noura Erakat and John Reynolds in their only UK event for 2026. They will present their new book, Confronting Zionism, followed by a conversation with Rafeef Ziadah.
Join us on November 17th to hear from one of the world’s most powerful speakers on Palestine and be among the first in the world to pick up your copy of Confronting Zionism.
About the Book:
For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. Confronting Zionism takes direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives.
Taking lessons from ongoing inequalities in South Africa as well as anticolonial and socialist policies across the global south, Confronting Zionism argues that at this crucial historical juncture, decolonization in Palestine predicated on redistribution, reparations and refugee return remains the only just way forward.
Watch now: Tareq Baconi with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nesrine Malik
Last week, we were honoured to host the London launch of Tareq Baconi’s new manifesto What Now? with a deep diving and urgent conversation between Tareq and Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nesrine Malik.
Initial clips of the conversation have been viewed almost one million times over the weekend and you can new watch the event in full on our YouTube channel.
Subscribers to the PalFest Bookshelf will be receieving What Now? as their Oct/Nov shipment.
Upcoming PalFest events
26 October-17 November (Ramallah & Gaza City) – Palestine Festival of Literature 2026
9 November (Chicago, Pilsen Community Bookstore) – Tareq Baconi with Eman Abdelhadi
13 November (New York, McNally Jackson Books) – Tareq Baconi with Rashid Khalidi
17 November (London, The Light) – Noura Erakat and John Reynolds present Confronting Zionism, with Rafeef Ziadah
Upcoming Palestine events around the world
27 October (Bethlehem) – صورة أخرى للقرية
27 October (Toronto) – Sarah Aziza, author of THE HOLLOW HALF (conversation with Rebecca Mangra)
29 October (Toronto) – One Book, Many Communities: Mohammed el-Kurd's Perfect Victims
29 October (New York) – Poetry & Song: Naomi Shihab Nye & Haleh Liza Gafori
30 October (New York) – NYC Book Launch | The Neck and the Sword & Palestinian Resistance Literature
31 October (Toronto) – Documentary Showcase: "Who Killed Alex Odeh?" + "7:60"
1 November (Manchester) – WITH HASAN IN GAZA + Post-Screening Discussion
1 November (Washington, DC) – susan abulhawa | A Busboys and Poets Books Presentation
1 November (New York) – Book Celebration for Darwish: Poems
2 November (Global) – Palestine Cinema Days International Screenings
4 November (New York) – Colloquy 23: Translating Palestine Now, with Sinan Antoon, Omar Berrada, and Huda J. Fakhreddine
5 November (Waterloo, ON) – Living with Drones
4 November (London) – Eden at Dawn: Karim Kattan with Tareq Baconi
6 November (New York) – Akbar Shahid Ahmed & Rozina Ali: Crossing the Red Line; Seasons of Fury
6 November (New York) – Elena Dudum & Kiese Laymon at McNally Jackson Books
6 November (Vancouver) – Queer and Trans Palestinian Writing Today
7 November (Santa Clara) – The Record Must Outlast the Erasure: Gaza Genocide Center Launch
8 November (Cambridge) – Why We Record: Defying Fragmentation and Erasure in Palestine
8 November (Chicago) – Film Screening - Between Sky and Sea
9 November (New York) – Book Launch: Lina Mounzer with John Freeman
10 November (Philadelphia) – Confronting Zionism: Book Release Party + Teach-In with Noura Erakat
12 November (London) – Stand Up for Palestine Comedy Night
13–14 November (Shrewsbury) – Shrewsbury Palestine Film Festival
13–27 November (London) – London Palestine Film Festival
13 November–6 December (Leeds) – Leeds Palestinian Film Festival
17 November (Exeter) – West Bank Under Attack
17 November (Oakland) – KPFA Presents Chris Hedges with Cat Brooks: Requiem for Gaza
19 November (Cambridge, MA) – Launching Kanafani's Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation
21 November (New York) – Imagining an Apartheid-Free Future at Home and Abroad
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Book of the Week
In a debut of wild scope, Sama'an Ashrawi's Baba Was a Rolling Stone tells the stories of his father’s place within the nascent Palestinian rock’n’roll scene of the '60s, as well as the author’s own odyssey through the living history of American music and culture.
Told in the voice of ‘the writer’, who attempts to track down a member of Al-Bara’em (The Blooms), the revolutionary family band his father fronted in his native Palestine, now missing somewhere in America, Ashrawi’s tale takes the form of a series of road trips that act as the catalyst for discoveries and recoveries of diasporic family histories and the great traditions of American music.
From the early blues through to New York hip-hop, hardcore punk, indie, classic funk and bleeding into stand-up, visual art, graffiti and fashion—Baba Was a Rolling Stone joins the infinite dots of American culture in a wholly new, wholly original way, and in apparently effortless, elegant prose, brings us a world of migrant America as influential as it is invisible. This is not just a book for our age, but truly a book for the ages—a book that contains all of Whitman’s American multitudes—and so, of course, that contains the whole world’s.
Order Baba Was a Rolling Stone from Rough Trade Books
Media Roundup
Two Poems by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel – Two new poems from Dalia Taha’s forthcoming collection Enter World, translated by Sara Elkamel: “The settlement drives / toward us like a truck—crushes us / as we sit on the balcony of the poet / of rocks and flowers, surrounded / by his rocks and his flowers.”
Is Israeli Prison Escapee Ayham Kamamji Finally Free? – Ruwaida Amer profiles Ayham Kamamji, the former political prisoner who dug out of Israeli prison with a spoon, who has been living in Cairo for the past year since he was deported after the Gaza ceasefire agreement.
‘A Disaster Zone’: Hebron Is Under Full Israeli Siege, Mayor Says – Bilge Kotan reports on the Israeli crackdown on Hebron, sealing off all entrances and displacing more than 2,000 people after two Israeli troops were killed at a checkpoint last week.
Waiting for Water – Hassan Herzallah writes about the daily struggle to find potable water in the camp where he lives in Gaza, unable to dig wells and dependent on unreliable deliveries from water trucks.
The Brutality of One – Abdullah Hany Daher reflects on the 1,111th day of Israel’s genocide: “In peacetime, one is an origin, a seed. From one person, a family. From one day, a life. Now in Gaza, one is a cruel remainder…. To live through 1111 days is not to survive a span of time; it is to survive the number one, eleven hundred and eleven times.”
A New Israeli Government Won’t Stop the Settlements – Diana Buttu speaks to Elias Feroz about what the upcoming elections will mean for Palestinians, the new death penalty law in Israel, and the postponed Palestinian elections.
Israel-Backed Palestinian Militias Terrorize Displaced Families in Gaza – Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous report on the increasing frequency of assaults by Israeli-backed Palestinian militias against Palestinians living near the so-called yellow line in Gaza.
We Beat the Trump Administration in Court. Now We’re Going to the ICC to Hold the U.S. Accountable for the Gaza Genocide – Tariq Ra’ouf, who has lost 49 family members in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, writes about suing the Trump administration in order to bring the United States to the International Criminal Court.
Alis al-Bustani’s ‘Sa’iba’ and the Arab Nahda – Ilham Essalih reviews the novel Sa’iba by Alis al-Bustani, published in 1891 as a kind of Ottoman gothic and proto-feminist text detailing the vulnerability of women within the institution of marriage and the importance of education.
1000 Forgotten Photographs from Gaza – A new episode of the podcast Tarwida, featuring a conversation with Kegham Djeghalian, who recently discovered an archive of a thousand negatives taken in his grandfather’s photo studio in Gaza between 1944 and 1981, about the afterlife of this archive and the glimpse these images offer into life in Gaza at the time.
Natives of the Country – Joelle M. Abi-Rached writes about Israel’s attempts to hijack the legacies of Lebanese Jewish leaders, themselves murdered in the context of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
NAZA and Israel’s History of Automated Warfare – Sophia Goodfriend reviews the film NAZA as offering a glimpse into how Israel’s embrace of AI technologies and automated warfare have made policies that once seemed “exceptionally cruel” far more palatable to the mainstream of Israeli society.
Writing About Palestinian Lives Beyond the Headlines – Mohammed Massoud Morsi describes the disjuncture between his experience on the ground as a humanitarian worker in Gaza, and the media framing of Palestinian life, highlighting the importance of writing about Palestine that can “retrieve the fragments of life which time wishes to bury.”
How Do You Take a Little of Your Life? – In this piece translated by Sarah Enany, Sara Alwadia describes how the act of writing, for her, is a way of recovering the home she has lost in Gaza: “To give the house another place to live, the uprooted tree another place to set down roots.”
Limited Edition Poster Print
You can support the festival in Palestine by buying a limited edition A2 print of our 2026 poster.
Thanks for reading.
Until next week.
