Real Lives
Sarah Aziza carries Ibdis and Deir al-Balah into an award-winning memoir
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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United States Artists named the Palestinian-American writer Sarah Aziza a 2026 Fellow in Writing, one of the unrestricted $50,000 awards the organisation gives each year to artists across the country. It is the fourth honour her first book has collected in eighteen months, and the one that buys her the thing writers rarely get: time.
The book is "The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders," published by Catapult in April 2025 and out in paperback this April.
It runs to four hundred pages and moves through three generations of one Palestinian family — from 'Ibdis, the village in the Gaza sub-district that was depopulated in 1948, and Deir al-Balah, where the family's story continues, outward across the world the way Palestinian families have been made to go.
The night the book began#
Aziza has said the writing began at the point where her own life nearly ended: a near-fatal hospitalisation for anorexia in October 2019. In the memoir, the doctors bring her back, and her grandmother — dead, and unwilling to stay quiet about it — begins to appear at the edges of the room.
What follows is the excavation. The book sets a granddaughter's starved body beside a grandmother's expelled one and refuses to treat either as a metaphor for the other. Both happened. Both are the subject.
A book that will not sit still#
Reviewers have reached for the same word, which is a good sign in a first book: inventive. The critic at Vulture called it "formally inventive, refreshingly honest, and politically sharp." The novelist Kiese Laymon praised its refusal to settle.
Aziza braids Arabic and English, memoir and poem, the archive and the hospital chart, and lets the timelines run across one another rather than in a line — which is, in the end, the honest shape for a family whose century has not been a line either.
The shelf so far#
"The Hollow Half" won the Memoir Award at the Palestine Book Awards in 2025 and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for memoir in 2026, the prize that went to Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison before her.
It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in nonfiction and named a best book of the year by Elle, Vulture and BookPage. The United States Artists fellowship, announced with the 2026 class, arrives on top of that.
Aziza's journalism sits under all of it. She has reported and written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Baffler and the Arab-American literary journal Mizna, and her essays have been collected in Best American Essays.
The village of 'Ibdis has not existed on an Israeli map since 1948. As of this year, its name is in the citation of an American literary prize, spelled correctly, in a sentence about a writer's grandmother — which is one of the ways a place refuses to be finished.
