The Seven Palestinian Nominees for the 2027 Astrid Lindgren Award

OCTOBER 15, 2026 — Yesterday, organizers announced a total of 277 children’s book authors, illustrators, storytellers, and reading advocates from 80 countries and regions nominated for the 2027 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

The prize’s laureate is set to be announced on April 6, 2027.

As in previous years, there are a preponderance of European and North American nominees, with fourteen from the UK, twelve from the US, ten from France, and nine from Italy.

However, there are also a surprising seven nominees this year from Palestine.

They are, in the order they were listed on the Astrid Lindgren website:

1) Author, poet, and reading advocate Ahlam Bsharat

Two of Ahlam Bsharat’s novels for young readers are available in English translation; both were published by Neem Tree Press. They are Trees for the Absentees, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Sue Copeland, and Code Name: Butterfly, translated by Nancy Roberts.

Scholar-translator Nora Parr said of Trees for the Absentees: “A most ordinary, magical, devastating story: What Trees for the Absentees shares with works by authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Louis Borges is that it finds a way within fiction to beautifully express what the ‘real’ somehow cannot.”

Also read:

Protecting Recollections in ‘The Memory Factory’

Ahlam Bsharat’s ‘Code Name: Butterfly’ Chosen as 2018 Read for ‘One Book, Many Communities’ Project

Poems by Ahlam Bsharat

An Excerpt from: Ahlam Bsharat’s ‘I Saw, Father, What You Saw’

‘The Cat Cow’ by Ahlam Bsharat

’67 Children’: A Friday Poem by Ahlam Bsharat

New Poetry by Ahlam Bsharat: ‘I Saw a Dead Road on the Road’

2) Illustrator Amal Barghout-Karzai

As they write at “The Rights of Every Child“:

Amal Barghout Karzai’s dramatically narrative paintings cover a spectrum of books, magazines, posters and cover art. Her fascination for the visual word stems from her Palestinian background and any excuse to research a strong story. Her clients include the @tamerinstitute , HarperCollins, Kalimat, DoubleInk, Clavis, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, E-public, Benchmark Education, Heritage Publishing, Kan Yama Kan, Red Squirrel Magazine, Magic World Media, Taotime Verlag, Xiaoduo Media, and more.  Amal’s author-illustrated book MY KEY is the 2022 winner of the Northern Lights Book Award. Twice short-listed by P alestinian publishers for the IBBY Award nomination, her art has been featured in museums, including pieces now held in private collections. Her MFA in Illustration is from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, and she teaches illustration online.

You can find some of Amal’s illustrations at amalillustration.com as well as on Instagram.

3) Author Hooda Shawa

Hooda began writing for children in 2005 in what she called, in an interview with Bulaq, an “act of defiance — a small stand in what seemed like a losing battle against the ‘globalized international school syndrome.'” She added that her “two daughters were voracious readers, but voracious readers of English: they came home from their bilingual school with assigned fiction by Roald Dahl and Jacqueline Wilson, and nothing at all in Arabic.”

Aiming to rectify this, Hooda had her first big award-winning book in The Bird’s Journey to Mount Qaf, which took the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2008 and was published in English translation by Saqi Books. Hooda has since published many more books for young readers; an excerpt from her graphic novel Gilgamesh’s Skull appeared in our Gaza! Gaza! Gaza! issue, and her The Necklace of Seven Souls is out in Sawad Hussain and Nour Jaljuli’s excellent translation this fall.

Also read:

Palestinian Sittis and the Inheritance of Memories

New Fiction in Translation: Excerpt from ‘Dragon of Bethlehem’

4) Lajee Center

The Lajee is a center for the promotion of reading. You can find more at lajee.org, where they write:

Lajee Center was established in Aida Refugee Camp in April 2000 by a group of 11 young people from the Camp who wanted to serve the community. Lajee’ means ‘refugee’ in Arabic. Lajee is a community-based grassroots creative cultural center that works with new generations of Palestinians as they continue their ongoing struggle for justice and rights for Palestine and all Palestinians. The center began as a dream for its creators who worked intensively and with true Palestinian ‘sumoud’ (steadfastness) in order to make that dream become a reality. By April 2001, Lajee had rented its first premises, a former garage measuring 70 square meters that was to be Lajee’s base until 2009. In the same month Lajee was registered with the Ministry of NGO Affairs of the Palestinian National Authority.

5) The SERAJ Library Project

This is another important center for the promotion of reading. You can read more at serajlibraries.org, where they write:

The Seraj Library Project was founded in 2005 by Laurie and Estephan Salameh. Laurie has a Master’s degree in Nonprofit Administration from North Park University and is the Executive Director of Seraj in Palestine. Estephan holds a PhD in Urban Planning and Public Policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

6) Author and educator Sonia Nimr

As they write at Archipelago:

Sonia Nimr is considered one of the most important children’s writers in the Arab world. She was born in Jenin in the occupied West Bank in 1955. As a child, folklore, proverbs, the stories of Victor Hugo and Naguib Mahfouz, and tales of her own making mixed with lived experience, forming Nimr’s sensibility. During Nimr’s undergraduate studies at Birzeit University in Ramallah, she was arrested and sentenced to three years in an Israeli prison for political reasons. It was in prison that she began writing. She went on to earn a PhD in Palestinian history at the University of Exeter in England. Nimr’s first two picture books Al Tanboury’s Shoes and The Clever Swallow were inspired by Palestinian folk tales, and published in 1996. She returned to Palestine, after working with the Museum of Mankind and the British Museum, in 1999. Over the years, Nimr has published 21 books for children and young adults, winning major awards for her work, including the Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature, and multiple nominations for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Since 2006, Nimr has also worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Birzeit University.

You can and should read Sonia’s Palestine Book Award-winning Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands and Banipal Translation Award-shortlisted Thunderbird trilogy in English translation. Her The Blue Door is also coming soon from Archipelago in Yasmeen Hanoosh’s beautiful translation.

7) Yafa Cultural Center

Also a center for the promotion of reading, you can find more about their work at yafacenter.ps, where they note that “YCC works toward building a local community that holds firm to principles of freedom and independence and that can assert its legally enshrined rights, most importantly the right of return. YCC also aims to develop the role of women in their local communities, and works to improve their social position by encouraging their active participation in the development of Palestinian society as a whole.”

Although there were surprisingly no nominees this year from Egypt, there were nominees from Tunisia, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Morocco, and the Western Sahara.

Raouf Karray (Tunisian illustrator), ASSABIL – Culture for All (promoter of reading, Lebanon); Bubisher (promoter of reading, Western Sahara), Ghizlane El Ayadi (Moroccan author), Hassan Manasra (Jordanian illustrator), Intelaq Mohammed Ali (Iraqi author and promoter of reading), and the great Lebanese illustrator, Maya Fidawi.