The shortlist for the Palestine Book Awards 2020 was announced on June 20, 2020.
On the matter of the plight of our brethren, sistren, and transren in the Middle East, Nelson Mandela famously said, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of all Palestinians.” With such an important endorsement of our fellow oppressed, we here at JamesMurua.com are happy to shine a light on what is happening in that part of the world. In spite of what you might have been told, there are writers from that part of the world and we love to tell you what they are up to.
The annual Palestine Book Awards were set up to honour the best new books about any aspect of Palestine in English in 2012. Some of the previous winners have been Isabella Hammad, Noura Erakat, Nabil Anani, Ghassan Zaqtanhas, Reja-e Busailah, and Salim Tamari.
The 2020 edition of the awards are being judged by Iraqi novelist and author Haifa Zangana; Al-Hiwar TV journalist Ibrahim Darwish; former chairman of Medical Aid for Palestinians Alan Waddams; literary critic and political commentator Subhi Hadidi; Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS’ Nur Masalha; and former associate foreign editor of The Guardian Victoria Brittain. This panel have announced those in the running for this year’s awards and they are;
- Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World (Bloomsbury Circus).
- Finbarr Barry Flood (editor), There Where You Are Not: Selected Writings of Kamal Boullata (Hirmer Verlag, Munich).
- Nathalie Handal, Life in a Country Album (University Of Pittsburgh Press).
- Rashid Khalidi, The hundred years’ war on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 (Metropolitan Books/henry Holt & Company).
- Sahar Khalifeh (Author), Sawad Hussain (Translator), Passage to the Plaza (Seagull Books).
- Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (Cambridge University Press).
- Gardner Thompson, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books)
The winners of the award will be announced in November.
