Rethinking styles, spaces, and histories: Meet the Creative and Critical Writings 2026 grantees
10 / 9 / 2026

Twenty-two writing projects from Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, and Tunisia have been selected for support under AFAC’s 2026 Creative and Critical Writings program.

Among the themes explored in these projects include women’s struggles in Syria, loss and its many forms in Tunisia and Palestine, and stories of war and migration in Sudan. Other works offer a historical, fact-based look at life in Gaza, another revisits war memories from Iraq through the eyes of an Alzheimer’s patient. From Egypt, fresh perspectives emerge on letter writing, father-daughter relationships, two decades of life around libraries and the publishing industry, societal contradictions, and the complex relationship between women and breast cancer.

Over the course of the application window, AFAC received 314 applications that were shared with readers committees for a first evaluation. The committees included Sabah Sanhouri (Sudan), Aymen Daboussi (Tunisia), Abdelaziz Errachidi (Morocco), Dunya Mikhail (Iraq), Zeinab Tarhini (Lebanon) and Waiel Ashry (Egypt). The applications that passed this stage were then submitted to a committee of independent jurors.

The 2026 Creative and Critical Writings jurors — Syrian author and journalist Samar Yazbek, Palestinian writer and translator Bekriah Mawasi and Algerian writer Salah Badis — convened to make the selection, and issued the following statement:

    “The jury committee was pleased to read and review the texts that reached the final stages of selection, which ranged from narrative works to research-based writing. In evaluating the projects, the jury considered several criteria, including originality, innovation, artistic quality, and feasibility, while also taking into account the projects’ developmental and cultural impact.

    During the evaluation process, a number of shared interests were evident in the projects shortlisted for the grant. Applicants were thinking about the use of writing from a sense of historical responsibility in the present moment, engaging with a moment of change, and reflecting on the world and different concepts in light of the cruelty of recent years — from the genocide in Gaza and the war in Sudan, reaching back to the echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    There was also a clear interest in the short story and short prose texts, in writing as a form of power over time, and as a medium through which to contemplate anxiety, loss, everyday difficulties, and small victories.

    The publication formats represented among this year’s applicants varied, from printed books and digital magazines to graphic novels and online publishing platforms, with particular attention to ensuring continued access and long-term readability.

    Finally, the jury found a strong interest in collective learning through workshops addressing the substance of the projects, alongside an interest in data collection, personal archiving, and oral documentation as working methodologies.

    The judging process also offered a degree of insight into the state of the publishing market in the Arab world, particularly in the genres supported by the grant: short-form writing, whether prose or poetry, and critical writing. In this regard, the applications brought to our attention the sometimes prohibitive conditions imposed by publishers, most of which revolve around financial considerations.

    The jury committee would like to highlight the projects and texts that begin with contemporary, profound and universally shared questions and seek to answer them within the conditions and circumstances of Arab culture today, attempting to dig deeply into language and ideas. Projects such as these promise texts that are organic and relevant to our present, enriching the repository of our language and thought.

    It was also hard to overlook the presence of diverse, promising experimental and modernist texts, in which the effort to rewrite history from an analytical perspective situated between anthropology and philosophy occupies an important place.

    Not all of the texts made it to the final stage, but it is worth noting that among the projects presented to us, we found the beginnings of a new, systematic, and critical way of thinking about the relationship with history. For the research-based texts, this thinking entails deconstructing the mechanisms of historical conflict; for the creative texts, it involves working through imagination and literature to invent ways of confronting the brutality of reality.”

The selected projects vary widely in genre, ranging from short stories, autobiographical literature, creative and documentary non-fiction, geographical biography, and poetry, to online publishing initiatives, online literary journals, and training projects. The writers dig into unreleased archives, rethink places and histories, and delve into the human psyche to offer original approaches in both style and content.

Discover the 2026 Creative and Critical Writings projects