What Now? With Tareq Baconi

What Now for Palestine? What now for the world?

We open the Edinburgh Radical Book Fair 2026 as we mean to go on: with vital questions. To usher us in, we’re honoured and delighted to welcome writer, activist and scholar Tareq Baconi. His new book, What Now? is a soul-stirring, deeply thoughtful political treatise on what liberation for Palestine will mean, for everyone, in the crucial years to come. In it, he discusses how a Free Palestine is not the same as turning back the clock to pre-1948, but a new struggle for a just future we all desperately need.

You are whole-heartedly welcome to join us to bring in this year’s fair as Tareq speaks to Rahul Rao about how to pull insight and action out of defeat and despair, and the very real possibilities that lie ahead.

Our speaker

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction.

Our chair

Rahul Rao is a Reader in International Political Thought at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire (2025), Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (2020), and Third World Protest: Between Home and the World (2010). Besides writing for academic publications, his work has appeared in The Caravan, Himal Southasian, and on The Disorder of Things and Verso blogs. He is a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective.