Date: Saturday 18th April 2026

Venue: St. George’s Bristol

Time: 16:00 - 17:00

Tickets: £5 / £3 / FREE

✅ Live Streamed (book a ‘Live Stream Ticket’ at checkout)

✅ All Lyra Fest venues are wheelchair accessible. Access Information Pack available at www.lyrafest.com.

From Dust We Rise: Young Voices of Gaza

Presented in association with The Hands up Project, We Are Not Numbers and Tenement Press

A powerful, moving and urgent hour of poetry from young Palestinian voices, whose poems centre hopes, dreams and unspeakable struggles and losses. The event will be headlined by two gifted young poets from Gaza, Haia Mohammed (The Age of Olive Trees)**** and Batool Abu Akleen (48kg. / ٤٨ كغم ), reading from their debut poetry books. Batool will be appearing digitally.

Acclaimed UK-based poets and writers Alice Oswald, Peter Oswald, Zaffar Kunial, Ahmed Alnaouq and Joelle Taylor will recite works written by children in Gaza, published in recent books including From Dust We Rise (Hands Up Project) and We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth (Penguin Books UK). 

Haia Mohammed:

Haia Mohammed is 22-year-old Palestinian poet and artist from Gaza. Her work explores memory, land, and the intimate textures of survival, often weaving personal witness with collective history. Through poetry and visual art, she documents the fragile and resilient moments that shape Palestinian life.

The Age of Olive Trees (Out-Spoken Press, 2025), her debut pamphlet, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. The work was written across years marked by displacement, longing, and the insistence on voice. Haia’s creative practice continues to expand across genres and borders.

Batool Abu Akleen

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).

Alice Oswald:

Poet Alice Oswald was trained as a classicist at New College, University of Oxford. Revered as a major poet in her native England, her honors include prestigious awards like the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Oswald is the author of 11 collections of poetry. Her first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (1996), received a Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. She often works in book-length projects and is known for her interests in gardening, ecology, and music. Her second book, Dart (2002), was the outcome of years of primary and secondary research into the history, environment, and community along the River Dart in Devon, England. She followed those collections with Woods, etc. (2005), winner of a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Weeds and Wild Flowers (2009), illustrated by Jessica Greenman; A Sleepwalk on the Severn (2009); and Memorial (2011), a reworking of Homer’s Iliad that has received high critical praise for its innovative approach and stunning imagery, which won the 2013 Warwick Prize for writing. Oswald was the first poet to win the prize. Her other books include Falling Awake (2016), Nobody (2019); and A Short Story of Falling (2020). Oswald has also edited an anthology of nature poetry titled The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (2006).

Peter Oswald:

Peter Oswald is a playwright, poet and performer who was Writer in Residence at Shakespeare's Globe from 1998 to 2005. He writes plays in verse and three of them were performed there, two starring Mark Rylance; his plays have been performed at the National Theatre, in the West End, on Broadway and around the world in various languages. His poems are published by Mysterium, Shearsman and Oberon, his plays by Oberon, Methuen and OUP. He is a founder member of Columbina Theatre Company, which combines contemporary verse drama with the Commedia tradition.

In 2025 he initiated the Pilgrimage for Palestine, and walked from Bristol to London over two weeks, observing the Ramadan fast and sharing iftar at mosques along the way, whilst taking part in events at seven different locations, speaking the poems of Palestinian children. The P4P is organised by the Bristol Palestine Alliance, and others. It aims to raise awareness of the genocide in Palestine, push back against racism and raise funds for the Hands Up Project, which works with children in Palestine. The Pilgrimage continues in 2026, starting in Spain then starting again in Bristol. In 2025 Peter also directed Welcome to Gaza, a play made out of short plays by Palestinian children, that toured Britain with a cast of mainly Palestinian actors. 

Zaffar Kunial:

Zaffar Kunial is a British poet born in Birmingham, who currently lives in Shipley, Yorkshire. His mother was English and his father, who has since moved to Lahore, is from Kashmir. Zaffar studied at the London School of Economics and later attended Michael Donaghy’s classes at City University.

He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and was Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust the same year. In 2011 he won third prize in the National Poetry Competition with ‘Hill Speak’. With Steve Ely, Denise Riley and Warsan Shire, he contributed to The Pity, a series of new poems commissioned and published by the Poetry Society as a response to the centenary of the First World War.

His debut collection US was published by Faber in 2018, and in the same year was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize.

Ahmed Alnaouq:

Ahmed Alnaouq is co-founder of We Are Not Numbers.

He grew up in Gaza, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from al-Azher University, but currently he is based in London. Ahmed was the inspiration for, and original project manager of, We Are Not Numbers. He later won the UK’s prestigious Chevening scholarship and earned a Master’s degree in international journalism from Leeds University. Today, in addition to his role as a Steering Committee member of We Are Not Numbers, he is cofounder of Border Gone, a media project that tells stories from Gaza in Hebrew. He also serves as advocacy and outreach officer for the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Ahmed’s writings have been published by the Gulf News, New Arab and other websites.

Joelle Taylor:

Joelle Taylor is a queer, working-class author of six plays, a novel, and four collections of poetry. Her 2021 collection, C+NTO & Othered Poems, won the TS Eliot Prize, the Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors, and is currently being adapted for the theatre. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Poetry Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her latest collection Maryville, released in November 2025, charts the lives of four butch lesbians through five decades of underground queer history and was described as ‘urgent and memorable’ by The Guardian. Joelle is the host and co-curator of Out-Spoken, the UK’s premier poetry and music club, currently resident at the Southbank Centre. She has featured regularly on BBC radio and television, presenting the documentaries Butch, and A Young Girl's Guide to Horror.

The Hands Up Project:

The Hands up Project is a charity trust which, through its network of volunteers, connects children around the world with young people in Palestine. By means of online interaction, drama and storytelling activities, it enables the use of creativity and self-expression to promote mutual understanding, personal growth, and the development of English language skills.

Tenement Press:

Tenement Press, a house for homeless ideas, is an independent publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion of experimental literary works—in English and first-time translation.
tenementpress.com

We Are Not Numbers:

When the world talks about Palestinians living under occupation and in refugee camps, it is usually in terms of politics and numbers — specifically, how many killed, injured, displaced, homeless, and/or dependent on aid.

But numbers are impersonal and often numbing. What they don’t convey are the daily personal struggles and triumphs, the tears and the laughter, and the dreams and aspirations that are universally experienced but often not recognized for Palestinians, who instead have been dehumanized.

That’s why established and aspiring wordsmiths from around the world have joined with young people from Palestine to create We Are Not Numbers. Through this platform, WANN shares with the world authentic and compelling stories from the next generation of Palestinian writers and leaders.
www.wearenotnumbers.org

Part of Lyra – Bristol Poetry Festival 2026

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