Join us for Writing Palestine, an evening of conversation with leading Palestinian writers and journalists. Organized in collaboration with the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest)—the cultural initiative that since 2008 has staged an international literary festival across historic Palestine—this discussion brings together three powerful voices who write against forgetting.

Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and organizer named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021. His poetry collection Rifqa was shortlisted for the 2022 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and his latest book, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, examines how Palestinian suffering is framed and exploited in Western discourse.

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist and journalist based in New York. Her novel The Book of Disappearance, longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, depicts a world emptied of Palestinians in an instant, forcing those left behind to make sense of what remains.

Ahmed Alnaouq is a journalist from Gaza and the co-founder and director of “We Are Not Numbers,” a collective that trains the next generation of Palestinian writers to publish their stories in English. He is also a podcast host with Palestine Deep Dive.

Kamila Shamsie, our inaugural Writer-in-Residence, will lead the conversation.

Location: Auditorium, Georgetown University in Qatar