Poetry Reading: 48kg by Batool Abu Akleen
# Please note, the date for this event in the printed programme is incorrect. The correct date is Saturday, 13 December.
Tenement Press and East Bristol Books present readings in English and Arabic from 48kg, a debut, bilingual collection of poems by Batool Abu Akleen. The evening will feature contributions from translator and poet Cristina Viti and pre-recorded readings in Arabic from Abu Akleen, with an introduction from novelist Max Porter.
Batool Abu Akleen is a Palestinian poet and translator from Gaza City. At the age of fifteen, 2020, she won the Barjeel Poetry Prize for her poem ‘I didn’t steal the cloud,’ which was published in the Beirut-based magazine Rusted Radishes thereafter. Abu Akleen’s poetry has been translated into several languages and featured in numerous international publications, including ArabLit and The Massachusetts Review, amongst others. Her poem ‘Gunpowder’ was awarded third place in the 2025 London Magazine poetry prize, and her work was included in the July 2024 issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, ‘Salam to Gaza.’ Abu Akleen was Modern Poetry in Translation’s 2024 ‘Poet / Translator in Residence.’ Her poetry has appeared in editors Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer’s anthology, Letters from Gaza (Penguin, 2025) and—alongside Nahil Mohan, Sondos Sabra and Ala’a Obaid— she is one of the four Gazan authors included in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Comma Press, 2025).
Cristina Viti is a translator and poet working with Italian, English & French, and a contributing editor with Tenement Press. Among her recent Tenement titles, as translator and/or editor, are Batool Abu Akleen’s 48Kg (2025), An Anarchist Playbook (with the Radical Translation Workshop, 2024) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger (2022).
Max Porter is the author of four novels. His work has been translated into 37 languages. He is a frequent collaborator with artists, musicians and theatre-makers. His first screenplay, STEVE, came out in 2025. Porter is Associate Artist at the Southbank Centre.
At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses.
—Claire Armistead, The Guardian
Batool Abu Akleen writes sinuous, urgent, intimately provocative poems that we need.
—Eileen Myles
The poets of Palestine have become vital archivists. In 48Kg Batool Abu Akleen not only provides brute testimony of the Genocide committed by Israel against her people, but by her inventiveness and surreality, by the barbed humour and bitter irony of her voice, and the tender revelation and humane wisdom of her work, she defiantly gives voice and futurity to Palestinian life. She writes that she waits for death, ‘like a mother expecting her newborn’ telling us, ‘I will scream / I will feel his head coming out of my body.’ No one should have to write these incredible, haunting lines, but everyone should read them. This is an extraordinary book of poetry.
—Jack Underwood
In association with Tenement Press and East Bristol Books.
Donations
All donations from this year’s festival will go to Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), providing humanitarian assistance as well as health and social services to Palestinians whenever and wherever needed. You can donate here.
