In Sonia Nimr’s imagined historical fable set in Palestine hundreds of years ago, Qamr and her family embark on daring adventures across empires in a quest to remove a curse that hangs over their village, running into pirates, kings and kidnappers.

Even though Israel is surrounded by Arab countries, rules over millions of Palestinians, and that over half of the Israeli Jewish population originates from Arabic-speaking countries, more literature is translated from Swedish into Hebrew than from Arabic each year. The Forum of Arabic-Hebrew Translators seeks to change this through promoting suppressed Palestinian narratives to an Israeli audience. It is “a political model […] to decolonize the colonial relations between the languages,” co-founder Yehouda Shenhav explains. To “serve as a model for shared sovereignty in Israel-Palestine in the Middle East, so as to be a model for politics itself”.