Professor Tamari wins international literature prize on article about late-Ottoman Palestine

Salim Tamari, professor of sociology at Birzeit University, received the 2018 Palestine Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award. The award, sponsored by the Middle East Monitor in the United Kingdom, honors authors’ contributions to literature on Palestine. Tamari contributed to this year’s shortlist with “The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine.”

Salim Tamari worked at Birzeit University from 1971 until 2005 before going on to be a visiting professor at several universities, including Harvard University, University of Venice, Columbia University and Bogazici University. Presently, he is editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly journal and head researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies. Tamari has authored several books on religious culture, political sociology, biographies, and social history, among them several recent publications.

Rejae Busailah, former English literature instructor at Birzeit University, won the Memoir Award for his autobiographic work “In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood.” Busailah has taught English Literature at Indiana University and Muhammad V University in Morocco.

The awards ceremony brought together “Palestinian literature, research work, and poetry to audiences across continents.” This year, 44 books were nominated for the awards, with the winners selected by a panel of expert judges in the Academic, Memoir, and Lifetime Achievement categories.