What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Ibtisam Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel
Sinan Antoon
Born in Baghdad, Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, and translator
Antoon holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he specialised in Arabic literature. He has published five novels and two poetry collections. His most recent work is Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull, 2023). His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. He is an associate professor at New York University.
His essays and op-eds in English have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, and Journal of Arabic Literature, among others. Antoon returned to his native Baghdad in 2003 to co-direct About Baghdad, a documentary about the lives of Iraqis in a post-Saddam-occupied Iraq. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and associate professor of Arabic literature at New York University.
His English-language translation of The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
Speculative and haunting, this is an exceptional exercise in memory-making and psycho-geography
The 2025 judges on The Book of Disappearance
All nominated books
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Ibtisam Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel
By Ibtisam Azem
Translated by Sinan Antoon
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