LONDON: Isabella Hammad & Mirza Waheed on Palestine & Kashmir, 1 November

Join Isabella Hammad and Mirza Waheed for a unique discussion about Palestine, Kashmir and the parallels and divergences in their modern struggles with colonialism.

They will discuss art and consciousness around the dual ruptures of 1948, reportage and narration of historical insurgency and their own roles as artists working from within the imperial core.

Presented as part of the 2025 London Literature Festival.

NEW YORK: Networks of Value, 22 October

In October 2024, a few hundred writers and book workers signed an open letter boycotting Israeli literary and cultural institutions that are complicit in violating Palestinian rights, and/or have not recognized those rights publicly. Within a week, more than 5,500 more writers and book workers joined them in taking this position.

The unprecedented size of the literary boycott signals the clarity with which people see the material and psychological connections between art and politics, between art and war, perhaps even between North and South. What limits and contradictions do we encounter when we use boycott as a starting point for resisting pacification in the arts and literature? What new possibilities, directions, and actions are opened up by working through and against them, in dialogue and in relation to one another? In tandem with The Poetry Project, we have invited Nour Annan, Alessandra Bastagli, Hannah Black, Ismail Ibrahim, Benjamin Krusling, and Abdeljawad Omar to think about these questions and more.

Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, 2 November

With its slogan “Emancipatory Film Culture in, from, and for Palestine”, Filmlab Palestine, a non-profit organization, strives, since its foundation in 2014, to promote, revive, and expand one of the most effective audiovisual tools for self-expression, storytelling, and the preservation of collective memory: Cinema. 

On November 2, the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Filmlab Palestine are organizing over 500 Palestinian film screenings around the world. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine, an act of amplification for censored Palestinian voices, and a contribution to shifting the distorted narrative.

Screenings will feature films such as Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention; Maha Haj's Upshot; Tewfik Saleh's The Dupes; Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi's A State of Passion; Mohammad Bakri's Jenin, Jenin; Annemarie Jacir's When I Saw You; and Lina Soualem's Bye Bye Tiberias.

Visit the Filmlab Palestine website to check out the full list of films and find a screening near you.

LONDON: White Kite Collective Solidarity Event, 8 November

Following a series of sold-out events at Arcola Theatre, Bush Theatre, Rich Mix and Tara Theatre, White Kite Collective bring their galvanising evening of solidarity to Stratford East for the first time.  

The event will take place in two halves: a first half featuring testimony, monologues, speeches, poetry, comedy and music; followed by a second half where we invite our audience to engage with us so we can all find ways to stand with Palestinians at this most terrible of times. 

White Kite Collective is a group of artists and culture workers formed in urgent response to the ongoing Palestinian genocide. We bear witness and galvanise to action through testimony, literature and collective discussion. White Kite Collective stand in solidarity with all peoples seeking liberation from global systems of oppression. 

The full line up of artists, speakers and musicians includes Yara Eid, Bilal Hasna, Jeanine Hourani, Denish Gough, Alexi Murdoch, luxx, Harriet Walter, Kathryn Hunter, Zena Agha, Sara Masry, Joel Samuels, Taghrid Choucair-Vizoso, and Zia Ahmed. 

This event is a fundraiser, raising money for Water Is Life and Bridge of Solidarity. 

Find more details and reserve your tickets here.

Book of the Week

N Mo'alla's Love Letters to Baba is a powerful and striking collection of poems about exile, love, loss, and home. Expertly weaving these themes through each piece, Mo'alla lyrically recalls and invokes the works of Palestinian poetry. You feel her deep sense of longing — for home, for her father, for Palestine.

– Najla Said

An intimate, lyrical testament to loss, exile, and belonging, told through poetic letters from daughter to father.

Love Letters to Baba is a deeply personal and politically resonant collection of poetry by N Mo’alla, the grandchild of Nakba survivors. What began as a private act of mourning — for her late father and in response to the ongoing occupation of Palestine — evolved into a powerful tapestry of memory, resistance, and ancestral love.

Through intimate, unflinching verse, Mo’alla explores themes of exile, inherited grief, language loss, and the enduring spirit of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness). These letters to Baba are as much about personal loss as they are about collective survival — asserting Palestinian existence in the face of attempted erasure.

Blending poetic lyricism with historical weight, Love Letters to Baba refuses nostalgia and instead embraces a radical, grounded hope: not the passive promise of return, but the vow of it.

Love Letters to Baba is out now. Get your copy from Maqam Books.

Media Roundup

The Birds of Ala’ Al-Najjar – A poem by Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Dr. Sali Karmi, about Ala’ Al-Najjar, the pediatrician whose nine children were martyred while she was treating other survivors of the genocide: “Even if they slay the sea, / we shall find you in what remains of the land, / of a dream, / of an almond, / by the light, and / beneath a fig tree.”

A Country of Words: Mapping Memory, Resistance, and Exile in Palestinian Literary History – Walid el Houri interviews Refqa Abu-Remaileh about her project Country of Words, a transnational atlas of Palestinian literary history assembled out of fragmentary records and against settler colonial erasure.  

There Are No Ceasefires on Stolen Land – Tithi Bhattacharya argues against the liberal Zionist attempts to treat the ceasefire as a vindication of Israel’s fundamental legitimacy, insisting that the global movement for Palestine must use the respite of the ceasefire to expand and strengthen its efforts.

A Cold Welcome in Egypt – Rebecca Ruth Gould profiles two families who have been displaced from Gaza to Egypt to illustrate the hypocrisy that undergirds the Egyptian state’s position on Palestine.

As a Tenuous Ceasefire Holds, Will Gaza Dare To Dream Again? – Reporting from Gaza, Hassan Herzallah profiles four friends whose lives have been utterly upended by two years of genocide.

Forty-Eight Hours in Israeli Captivity – Captured aboard one of the flotilla vessels, Emily Wilder describes the violence that Israeli soldiers inflicted on her and other flotilla participants over several days in custody.

We Are Genocide Survivors. But Our War Is Far From Over. – “Survival is not the end,” writes Ali Skaik from Gaza, “it’s our beginning.”

Why Gaza Ceasefire Hopes Are Overshadowed by Dread – Abed Abou Shhadeh remains pessimistic about the possibility that the ceasefire will lead to greater self-determination for Palestinians, given the degree to which Arab states have proven willing to normalize with Israel.

War Paused, Accountability Denied: Gaza’s Struggle for Sovereignty – “The true test of peace,” writes Azmat Ali, “will not be how quickly Gaza is rebuilt, but whether its people are finally free to build it themselves.”

A Young Poet Chronicles Gaza’s Life and Loss – Three poems by the Gazan poet Yahya Al Hamarna, from his debut collection My Voice Cannot Be Bombed: “I don’t want more / than the sound of the birds.”

Returning to Shujaiya: Palestinians Are Going Back to Gaza City Despite Proximity of Israeli Troops – Abdel Qader Sabbah reports from Shujaiya, which straddles the IDF’s ‘yellow line,’ as Gazans returning from the south attempt to piece their homes and their lives back together. 

A Palestinian Daughter’s Search for Connection with Her Father, Her Past, and Her Homeland – An excerpt from Mai Serhan’s new book I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir, in which she traces her father’s life across Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China, and Palestine.

Shadows of My Fate– Two poems written and translated by the Gazan poet Samar Al Ghussein: “How can you kill them now? / Under which soil would you bury them, / so that they turn into nothing but glass, / so that your eyes will meet annihilation / one last time / in theirs.”

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