Help for Batul Abu Aklin
At just twenty years old, Abu Aklin is among the most powerful voices of the young generation of Palestinian poetry. She is a multiple award-winner, translated into several languages, and is herself already becoming a translator, editor, and mentor to her peers. She won her first international poetry prize at the age of fifteen.
For the past two years she has been writing, translating, and studying English and Translation in the circumstances of genocide. She has just completed her academic year as one of the top students in the English Department at the Islamic University of Gaza. During this time – while supporting her seven-member family after the loss of household income – she has published poetry and short prose in various journals, anthologies, and online platforms, edited and translated the digital anthology of Gaza’s youngest poets Sea Shells, and won third prize in a competition run by The London Magazine.
She has been a “remote resident” at Modern Poetry in Translation and a recipient of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Fellowship for Writers in Need. In July 2025, the British publisher Comma Press released the acclaimed anthology Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide, featuring four authors from Gaza, including Abu Aklin. For the 2025/26 academic year she has been accepted into the third year of undergraduate study in film at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris.
She now needs to raise funds to support her living expenses for two years of study – a condition for her to even be considered for evacuation from Gaza. The target is €30,000, which will cover a monthly stipend of €1,250. The fundraising campaign on the platform Chuffed is overseen by Léopold Lambert, editor-in-chief of the multilingual French magazine The Funambulist, with whom Batul collaborated on a special Palestinian issue (March–April 2025).
This is not only a springboard for Batul’s further studies and literary career – it could literally save her life, as conditions in the occupied and starved Gaza Strip are becoming increasingly unbearable and dangerous. The academic year in France begins in September, so fundraising must move quickly to ensure she can be placed on the evacuation list as soon as it reopens (currently evacuations to France are suspended).
Donation Details
Recipient: Slovene PEN Centre, Tomšičeva 12, 1000 Ljubljana
Purpose of transfer (MANDATORY!): BATU AKLIN
Purpose Code: OTHR
IBAN: SI56 0201 0001 2599 684
Reference: SI00 7890
Thank you for your support.