Palestine is everywhere

Co-published by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Silver Press, and the87Press, and edited by  Skye Arundhati Thomas, Edwin Nasr and Gloria Habsburg, Palestine is everywhere is a contributor-led anthology of testimony, poetry, essays, and artworks from Gaza and beyond.

The volume gathers contributions by writers, thinkers, artists, and poets to map the global resonance and amplify the actuality of the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Framed by Nasser Abourahme’s incisive assertion that “Palestine is everywhere because it names a political subject of radical universal emancipation,” the book provides time and space for sustained reflections on resistance, solidarity, and the right to self-determination amid a world-historical conjuncture marked by loss.

“Speak to Gaza, not just about Gaza,” contributor Mohammed Mhawish told the editors of Palestine is everywhere. That call shaped the anthology, which refuses to render Gaza “an abstraction” or “a metaphor.” Instead, it gathers diaries, poems, testimonies, and artworks that are “precious acts of resistance, scrupulously observed.” Written despite blockades, blackouts, and bombardment, the texts carry “the full, unconsoling weight” of bearing witness, each sentence having “circumvented and outlasted censor, bombardment, and erasure.”

It includes vital dispatches from Palestinian Gazan contributors, as well as academic essays, poems, protest chronicles, and letters from prison that weave together the rigor of theoretical insight with the urgency of lived experience. Palestine is everywhere is a testament to how Palestine, both as place and idea, refracts planetary struggles against our current political situation and provides a lens through which to reimagine collective emancipation. Most importantly, it is a call to bear witness.

This editorial project, initiated in 2023, expands in 2026 with a series of commissioned visual, sonic, and multimedia works presented on a dynamic digital platform, bringing it into the present tense. https://palestineiseverywhere.tba21.org/ 

All royalties from this project will be donated to Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN).

VOICES AND CONTRIBUTORS:

The anthology features contributions from: Lujayn, Alaa Abd El-Fattah (tr. Sarah Rifky), Nasser Abourahme, Amal Al Nakhala, Muhammad al-Zaqzouq (tr. Katharine Halls), Maisara Baroud, Ahmed Bassiouny (tr. Ibrahim Fawzy), Houria Bouteldja (tr. Edwin Nasr), Anees Ghanima (tr. Salma Alhafi), Sahar Khalifeh (tr. Nada Hodali), Laleh Khalili, Mira Mattar, Mohammed Mhawish, Nahil Mohana (tr. Katharine Halls), Lina Meruane (tr. Andrea Rosenberg), Nasser Rabah (tr. Wiam El-Tamami), Rahul Rao, Adam Rouhana, Ahmad Zaghmouri, among others.

Together, their texts bear witness to survival and defiance under siege, diaspora reflections, and planetary solidarities.

“There are moments when silence becomes complicity—when to look away is to become part of the machinery of erasure. Palestine is Everywhere emerges at one such moment. This collection does not trade in neutrality: it gathers acts of survival and dignity, and demands that art and language do more than witness—they must indict.” declare Rosa Ferré and Markus Reymann, co-directors of TBA21, in the foreword of the book. “The voices in these pages remind us that to grieve is not to surrender, that to speak is to resist annihilation, and that testimony is the fiercest form of hope: anchored in reality, alive to justice.” 

As the editors affirm, these works are not only testimony but survival, each “a stand against a second death: being forgotten.”

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:

Lujayn is a 15-year-old Palestinian writer and embroiderer based in Gaza. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Al Jazeera, and New Lines. She is currently pursuing her high school education online. 

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and currently an assistant professor at Bowdoin College. His works span colonial history and political theory, and his writing can be found in Critical Times, Radical Philosophy, Cultural Critique, and Critical Ethnic Studies. He is also the author of The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025).

Alaa Abd El-Fattah is an Egyptian-British writer, technologist, educator, and political activist. A leading figure of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, he has been repeatedly imprisoned for his writings and activism. He remains incarcerated despite completing a five-year sentence in 2024. He is the author of You Have Not Yet Been Defeated (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), a collection of texts written from within and beyond prison, which combine political analysis with personal reflection. A contributing writer to Mada Masr, his work engages questions of technology, state power, and public life. He is the son of Laila Soueif, the prominent academic and human rights advocate, and a father himself.

Salma Alhafi is a writer, a translator, and a coordinator with the One Democratic State Initiative. She has translated many books, both fiction and nonfiction.

Muhammad al‑Zaqzouq is a writer, editor, and researcher from Khan Younis, Gaza. His poetry collection Betrayed by the Soothsayers received the 2018 Al Khalili Prize for Poetry, and he is the co-editor, with Mahmoud Alshaer, of Letters from Gaza (Penguin Random House, 2025). He has worked tirelessly on bringing Gaza’s writings to the world. His own words have appeared in places like The New York Review of Books Online, The Berlin Review, and have also been translated into five European languages.

Ahmed Bassiouny is a Gazan writer with an M.A. in Political Science and International Relations from the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His work has appeared in various media outlets, and he has produced documentaries for Alaraby TV.

Maisara Baroud is a Palestinian artist known for his stark black-and-white works depicting history, suffering, and humanitarian struggles, particularly in Gaza. A graduate of Al-Najah and Helwan universities, he taught at Al-Aqsa University before his home and studio were destroyed in 2023. His subsequent visual diary, “I Am Still Alive,” has been exhibited at MoMA, MACBA, the Venice Biennale, and more.

Houria Bouteldja is a writer and activist of Algerian origin and a founding member of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), a decolonial political party in France. She is the author of Whites, Jews and Us: Towards a Politics of Revolutionary Love (Semiotext(e), 2017) and Beaufs et Barbares: Le pari du nous (La Fabrique, 2023). Her work addresses decolonial feminism, racism, autonomy, zionism, and political alliances, and has been widely translated. She contributed to the 2024 collective volume Combatting Antisemitism and Its Exploitation (La Fabrique), alongside Judith Butler and Naomi Klein.

Amal Al Nakhala, b. Gaza 1999, graduated from college in 2021, majoring in English Literature, her interest in art started way ahead from that. Trying to create her own unique process of drawing, she participated in multiple local and international exhibitions, creating several animations and four series of comics.

Avian D'Souza is a visual artist and designer. He has worked for various design firms in the UK and EU. His works include large-scale drawings and murals, including at GSCSK8 in Gwalior, India. He was previously the in-house artist at Incink Records LLP; and currently researching and developing data visualisation on 3D/VR interfaces.

Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer, translator, and editor. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review,  Granta, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, AGNI, LitHub, ArabLit, The Common, and several anthologies. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Translation Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 Disquiet International Prize, and received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2024. She is currently based in Berlin. https://wiameltamami.com/.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an award-winning literary translator whose translations have appeared in various literary outlets. He is also an editor at Asymptote and Minor Literatures. 

Anees Ghanima born in Gaza City, is a poet and web programmer. He is also the CEO of NormX Group, a software and enterprise resource planning company. In 2017, he received first place in the A. M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer of the Year Award in Poetry. His work reflects both digital precision and lyrical longing.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator. Her translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence (McSweeney’s, 2023) was awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. Her work appears in AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Mousse, Frieze, and elsewhere. 

Nada Hodali is a Palestinian literary translator. Following her Master’s Degree in Translation Studies from Durham University, Hodali has published her translations in ArabLit Quarterly, ANMLY, and FIKRA Magazine. Her most recent work is the translation of Safaa and the Tent: Diary of a Cartoonist from Gaza, Oct 2023 to Dec 2024 (Komiket Studios Inc., 2025). Her works can be viewed here: www.nadahodali.wordpress.com.

Sahar Khalifeh is one of Palestine’s most renowned female writers. She was born and raised in Nablus, and then received a scholarship to study in the United States. She eventually obtained a doctorate in Women’s Studies and American Literature from Iowa University. She is the founder of the Women’s Affairs Center in Nablus and the author of several novels, including Wild Thorns (Saqi Books, 2023), The Image, the Icon, and the Covenant (Interlink Books, 2006), which won the 2006 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. Her work has been translated into multiple languages.

Laleh Khalili is a professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter and the author or editor of seven books. Her work includes Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine (Cambridge, 2007), and she writes widely on political violence, infrastructure, and maritime politics. Her scholarship combines historical inquiry with ethnographic insight.

Mira Mattar writes fiction, poetry, and essays. Her books include Yes, I Am A Destroyer (Ma Bibliothèque, 2020), Affiliation (Sad Press, 2021), The Bow (The 87 Press, 2021), and And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring (X). She lives and works in London.

Mohammed Mhawish is a journalist and writer from Gaza. He has reported from both within the Strip and in exile, with work appearing in +972 Magazine, MSNBC, The New Arab, and The Economist. He previously reported for Al Jazeera English and is currently a contributing writer at The Nation. His Substack newsletter offers dispatches rooted in lived exile and collective memory. You may subscribe to it here: https://www.mohammedmhawish.com/.

Nahil Mohana is a writer and educator. She has remained in her hometown of Gaza City through the genocide, where she is keeping a diary that has been excerpted in AGNI, The Berlin Review, LitHub, and The Washington Post. She is the author of the novel No Men Allowed (Arab Scientific Publishers, 2021) and the story collection Life in a Square Meter (The Ugarit Cultural Center). She has written six plays, including Lipstick, produced by the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2015. Mohana is a graduate of Al-Azhar University and also teaches creative writing to children and young adults in Gaza. More at nahilmohana.com.

Lina Meruane is a Chilean writer and scholar of Palestinian descent. She is the award-winning author of five novels, two short story collections, and several nonfiction works, including her memoir Becoming Palestine and her lyric essay Palestine for example. Her work spans continents and genres, bearing witness to her heritage, displacement, and the diaspora experience.

Nasser Rabah is a Palestinian poet and novelist who lives in Gaza. He has published seven poetry collections and two novels, and his work has been translated into several languages. Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece (City Lights, 2025) is his first poetry collection in English translation. His work has also been featured in publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry, and The Paris Review.

Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Psychic Lives of Statues (Pluto, 2025), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (Oxford, 2020), and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (Oxford, 2010). His writings have appeared in numerous academic journals, including The Caravan and Himal Southasian, and he is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.

Sarah Rifky is a writer, curator, and art historian. She is a contributing editor to Mada Masr. Her writing spans contemporary art, politics, and speculative fiction in relation to the Arab world. She holds an MIT PhD in History and Theory of Art and Architecture.

Andrea Rosenberg translates fiction, nonfiction, and graphic narrative from Spanish and Portuguese. Her most recent publication is Marc Torices’s Cornelius: The Merry Life of a Wretched Dog (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025).

Adam Rouhana is a Palestinian-American photographer currently based between Jerusalem and London. His work examines questions of identity, surveillance, and belonging, both individual and collective. He has exhibited internationally, and engages with both documentary and conceptual approaches.

Rebecca Ruth Gould’s most recent book is Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (2023). Together with colleagues from Gaza, she founded The Lighthouse Collective to translate writing from Gaza. Her newsletter is called The Textual Materialist (rgould.substack.com).

Ahmad Zaghmouri is a Palestinian visual artist, creative strategist, and multidisciplinary storyteller. His work explores memory, displacement, and cultural identity through photography, audiovisual media, and poetic narrative. With a background in music and brand strategy, his work has been featured in leading international publications and cultural institutions.

ABOUT THE TEAM:

Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor from India. Her new book Pleasure Gardens (2024) (co-written with Izabella Scott) on constitutional law, military occupation and the relations between India and Israel is out now with Mack Books, as is her book on the painter Lalitha Lajmi, with Sternberg Press. She was previously co-editor of The White Review.

Edwin Nasr is a Lebanese writer and curator. He has worked with Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, CCA Berlin - Center for Contemporary Arts, and de Appel in Amsterdam. His essays on contemporary art practices and political developments in the Levant appear in n+1, Bidoun, Afterall Journal, The Funambulist, Mousse Magazine, and Mada Masr, among others. He is currently completing his first novel, out in 2026 with Wirklichkeit Books and Wendy's Subway.

Gloria Habsburg is a multimedia producer who focuses on impact storytelling. She was the associate producer on Academy Award-winning documentary film Navalny (2022). She also worked on the first iteration of the podcast series Biennial Bytes for Sharjah Art Foundation. She studied International Relations at SOAS in London, and also did a semester at Birzeit University in Palestine studying Arabic and Philosophy.

Farah Fayyad is a Lebanese graphic designer and printmaker, currently based between Beirut and Amsterdam. Her practice centers on Arabic typography and bilingual editorial design, with a focus on culturally grounded, research-driven work. Trained in classical Arabic calligraphy, she explores ways to reinterpret the script through contemporary tools and forms. She also experiments with screen-printing as both craft and public performance.

ABOUT THE PUBLISHERS:

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is an international foundation fostering cultural production that unsettles dominant narratives and uplifts those on the frontlines of ecological and political crises.

Silver Press is an independent imaginative publisher that began from feminist perspectives in 2017, publishing landmark texts including Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde, The Debutante and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, and Space Crone by Ursula K. Le Guin.

the87Press is a literary arts organisation based in South London focussed on representing marginalised authors and guided by the legacies of modernism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, environmentalism, and social justice.