Some prizes come with a medal, some with a statuette. The Neustadt comes with a silver eagle feather, and this week it went to Ibrahim Nasrallah. The Palestinian poet and novelist received the 2026 Neustadt International Prize for Literature at the University of Oklahoma, along with $50,000 and a certificate, at the close of a three-day festival held in his honor.
Nasrallah is the 29th laureate of the prize, which is run by World Literature Today, the university’s magazine of international literature. His win was announced last October, when Kathy Neustadt, speaking for the family that endows the award, read out his name. He was chosen by a jury of nine writers from a shortlist that also included Elif Batuman, Mathias Énard, Yoko Tawada and Jesmyn Ward.
From Al-Wehdat to Norman
Nasrallah was born in Amman in 1954 to Palestinian parents who had lost their home in 1948. He grew up in the Al-Wehdat refugee camp, went to United Nations schools and trained as a teacher, then began his working life teaching in Saudi Arabia. He has since published more than forty books of poetry and fiction, and he paints and takes photographs as well.
His largest project is the Palestinian Comedy, a sequence of novels covering some 250 years of Palestinian history. The book put forward to the jury was Time of White Horses, translated by Nancy Roberts. It follows three generations of a family in the village of Hadiya, and a much-loved white mare, from the last years of Ottoman rule to 1948. It was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009, and he went on to win that prize in 2018 with The Second War of the Dog, a dark vision of a greedy future in a country with no name.
“It is time the world sees the true Palestine, and Nasrallah’s work can offer this perspective”
He was put forward by the British Palestinian novelist Shereen Malherbe, one of the jurors, who wrote that his books let readers “connect deeply with Palestine outside of a colonial framework.” Robert Con Davis-Undiano, the magazine’s executive director, said the award would “mark a significant moment in the Western reapproach to Palestinian culture.”
Three days in Oklahoma
The Neustadt Lit Fest ran from September 28 to 30 in the Oklahoma Memorial Union, and every event was free. It opened with a roundtable on Nasrallah’s work with Malherbe and Roberts, followed by a panel of university scholars on the politics and culture behind his books. On Tuesday evening the family announced the next winner of its children’s prize, the NSK Neustadt, which went to Elizabeth Acevedo. On Wednesday morning Nasrallah read his poems in Arabic to the sound of an oud, with Roberts reading them in English, and then gave his prize lecture, “Lest We Lose the World.”
The prize likes to call itself the “American Nobel,” and it has a fair claim to the title. Any living writer from anywhere may win it, poets and playwrights as much as novelists, and its jury is made up entirely of writers. Several of its laureates, Gabriel García Márquez and Czesław Miłosz among them, later went on to Stockholm.
A word from the desk
Few English-speaking readers know Nasrallah’s name, which is just what a prize of this kind is for. If you want a place to start, try Time of White Horses. It is a long book, but it repays the time, and the horses alone are worth it.
News Editorial Desk, Pine Tree Shilling Publishing