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.” READ MORE…