The Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) is a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century.

The festival was created as an act of cultural solidarity with Palestine by a group of international cultural figures brought together by Founding Chair, Ahdaf Soueif, in 2008. Since then PalFest has run an annual festival in which international authors combine with their Palestinian counterparts for free, public events in cities across Palestine. During the daytimes, visiting authors are taken to sites of historical and political relevance and meet with artists, authors and activists.

Our hope is that the experience of visiting Palestine with PalFest expands authors’ vocabulary and imagination, that they will draw connections between their own work and the various processes of control ongoing in Palestine.

After nine years, we produced our first anthology of writings, This Is Not A Border: Reportage & Reflection from the Palestine Festival of Literature. After the tenth edition, we took a one-year break to consider our role in the world, before returning in 2019 with an expanded team and a refreshed focus on drawing the connections between the colonisation of Palestine and the continuing capitalist subjugation of much of the rest of the world. For 2020 our theme, Palestine & the Global South, will be the first of two editions on the same topic and will see our most international line-up yet.