Update: 2020 PalFest Postponed Due to Coronavirus

On March 5, organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature announced they were postponing until next year:

They write: “Around the world there are mass cancellations of events, ever-tighter border restrictions, increasing quarantine conditions – simply too many variables out of our control for us to responsibly stage an event with participants coming from around the world.”

As to the 2020 theme, “Palestine are the Global South,” they plan to “roll over and develop further for 2021.”

On the website, organizers write:

For PalFest 2020, we will be focused on the question of the relationship of Palestine with the Global South. What, today, is the Global South? It no longer exists as a geographical distinction, but rather a dividing line that runs between elites and the exploited across the world. At the height of the era of nominal decolonization and the non-aligned movement, there was clear solidarity with the Palestinian cause across a geographic, state-based global south. But with the end of the Cold War and the thirty year march of globalised capitalism those dynamics have been significantly re-arranged.

We have invited a selection of writers and thinkers from Kashmir, South Africa, India, Chile, Nigeria, the USA and, as always, the Palestinian diaspora, to discuss these shifting dynamics. Combining readings, a film programme and panel discussions we will look at neoliberalism’s transformations of our world, at systems of population control and methods of resistance, at educational programmes and efforts to decolonize the school, at publishing alternatives to the metropole and many more.

This year’s artists, publishers, and writers include Lina Meruane, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pankaj Mishra, Majd Kayyal, Eve Ewing, Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, and Saleem Haddad.

PalFest events are free and open to the public, set to be conducted in Arabic and English with live translation.