In this week’s round-up of global literary news, our editors report on the winners of the Palestine Book Awards and a worrying change of policy in Nigerian language education. Read on for more.
Shatha Abdellatif, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Palestine
On November 15, the Palestine Book Awards announced this year’s winners in Central London, honouring “the spirit of Palestine” amidst a critically transformative period. Hosted by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), the Palestine Book Awards welcomes nominations for writing on Palestine in English from publishers and authors, with no restrictions on their geographic or national backgrounds—thus worldling the literature of/on Palestine onto the global map of literary production.
Among the supremely intelligent works from this year’s winning titles was Mohammed El-Kurd’s Perfect Victims, making him a two-time winner of the PBA after Against Erasure took home the award in the creative category last year. Nasser Abourahme’s The Time Beneath the Concrete—an unflinching, rigorous monograph that positions refugee camps as the key to fathom the larger question of Palestine, and by extension, the spatio-temporal struggle in the larger context of Zionism’s settler colonial project in Palestine—won in the academic category. Abourahme astutely writes in his introduction: “All [Palestinians] live in the permanent temporariness of camptime, with varying degrees of extraterritorial dislocation and extralegal vulnerability.”
This year, the creative award went to Refaat Al-Areer’s If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, a collection curated by one of his closest collaborators, Yousef Al-Jamal. The title brings previously unpublished texts of Gaza’s martyred poet and exceptional professor, along with some of his most beloved verse, to commemorate a metamorphosis of poetic death that traverses and resists Zionism’s erasure politics.
In translation and oral History, Hazem Jamjoum’s translation of No One Knows Their Blood Type and Mohammed Tarbush’s My Palestine: An Impossible Exile were lauded out of the fierce competition (which saw a record number of submissions). Sara Aziza’s memoir The Hollow Half and Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This, were respectively honored with the memoir and counter-current awards. (El Akkad’s debut also doubled as the nonfiction winner in this year’s National Book Awards.)
The newly introduced Gaza Global Impact Award was presented to none other than Pankaj Mishra for The World After Gaza. The ceremony also featured the presentation of a lifetime achievement award, given to Palestine’s greatest historian and the co-founder of the Institute for Palestine Studies, Walid Khalidi.
As the claws of the genocide continue to rip apart the literary and cultural fabric of Palestine, waging a social and institutional genocide against writers, publishers, and bookstores alike, the Palestine Book Awards has become a platform from which to engage with anticolonial literary resistance, drifting away from the geographies of prestige that have long mapped the literary prize culture toward the literary geography of resistance.
Bethlehem Attfield, Editor-at-Large, reporting for Nigeria
In a shocking announcement, the Nigerian Federal Government recently revoked the policy requiring the use of a mother tongue or any local community languages as the medium of instruction in early childhood education. Instead, the education minister, Dr. Tunji Alausa, announced at the 2025 Language in Education International Conference (held from 12 to 13 November in Abuja), that English will now be the medium of instruction across primary to tertiary education levels. He explained that this change was driven by extensive data analysis, which showed that teaching in indigenous languages has adversely affected learning outcomes across various parts of the country.
According to the Nigerian Tribune, the announcement has sparked mixed public reactions, but the criticisms I have seen so far are much more passionate, especially considering that indigenous languages are already vulnerable in many communities. In an open letter published two weeks ago on Vanguard, the director of Cassava Republic Press clearly stated: “We stand for the plurality of Nigerian expressions. We know that translation, not assimilation, is the future. The work of building an inclusive, creative, and prosperous Nigeria must begin with respect and the nurturing of the languages in which Nigerians first know and encounter the world, and for many, it is simply not English.”
On a livelier note, the thirteenth Aké Book and Art Festival was held in Lagos from 20 to 22 November, with the theme of ‘Reclaiming Truth’. The three-day cultural event included panel discussions, poetry readings, conversations, and readings by renowned writers, as well as the screening of Nigeria’s first contemporary dance film, When Nigeria Happens. Among the book chats was Fatima Bala discussing her book Hafsatu Bebi, a multi-generational narrative exploring identity and family secrets, while Bolu Babalola talked about her novel Sweet Heat, a modern romance. In an article published by Pulse Nigeria, Adeola Olatunji vividly described her experience at the festival: ‘Walking through the venue between sessions felt like floating. Everywhere, people were discussing truth in politics, in romance, in poetry, in storytelling, in identity. The festival theme was not just written on banners. It was alive in the conversations happening in the hall and outside of it.’
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