Palestine Book Awards 2025: Winners Announced in London Ceremony

The fourteenth annual Palestine Book Awards, organised by the Middle East Monitor (MEMO), took place yesterday in London in a moving and powerful display of literary celebration. Now firmly established as a key cultural event, the eveing brought together writers, scholars, publishers, artists and activists committed to preserving Palestinian history, amplifying its narrative, and exposing the structures that seek to erase it.

This year marked a record-breaking edition of the awards, with over 80 books submitted across categories. The winners of the 2025 Palestine Book Awards were announced during the ceremony, with honours going to:

The celebrations began a day earlier, on Thursday evening, with a pre-launch event featuring all the shortlisted authors. Held at the P21 Gallery in London, the evening drew a full house to engage with the shortlisted authors for the 2025 awards.

Friday’s ceremony, held in central London, was hosted by British-Palestinian activist and spoken word poet Leanne Mohamad. Opening the event, she reflected on the enormity of the moment: “The world is never the same after Gaza,” she said, before leading a prayer in memory of Dr Refaat Alareer and all Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide. “They invent many ways to erase us,” she added, “and we find many ways to live.”

Dr Daud Abdullah, director of MEMO, gave the opening remarks. He thanked the authors, publishers, judges, staff and volunteers who made the event possible. Abdullah reflected on the unifying theme of this year’s submissions: “These books tell the central story of Palestine—the people’s unyielding determination to resist subjugation.” Highlighting the barbarity of Israel’s destruction of hospitals, schools and civilian life, he stressed that such crimes long predate the current assault. “In this dark time of pain and criminality,” he affirmed, “the authors have shone a light. In the eyes of Palestinians, all of them are winners.”

The evening’s keynote address was delivered by renowned British-Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah. In a searing reflection on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he called on the audience to “figure out what we need to do moving forward to prevent our erasure.” Genocide, he explained, remains a fundamentally “primitive enterprise” that relies on famine, epidemics and ethnic cleansing. “Most people in Gaza have been displaced nine times,” he said, underscoring the scale of forced displacement in the besieged enclave.

Abu-Sittah warned that a critical component of genocide is denial, which is made possible through racism, radicalisation and the dehumanisation of the victims. He explained that the erasure of Palestinian life requires what he termed the “un-grievability” of Palestinian children: they must be stripped of public sympathy so their mass killing can be rendered acceptable. “This is what allows genocide to happen,” he said.

He noted that the violence in Gaza has not merely shocked the world but has exposed it. “Gaza has lit up the permeation of power in all levels of society,” he said. “It has exposed how far that power will go to maintain its dominance and erase what it considers to be ‘surplus populations’.”  The genocide, he argued, is not an aberration but a new phase in Israel’s decades-long settler-colonial project. The Zionist movement, he said, has moved beyond managing the Palestinian issue to seeking its total erasure.

The awards were presented throughout the evening by judges and special guests, including Dr Ashjan Ajour, Professor Penny Green, Dr Afaf Jabiri, and Feras Abu Helal. 

The ceremony closed with a video tribute to Professor Walid Khalidi, recipient of this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award.