This July, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival dives headfirst into nostalgia, not the sepia-tinted kind, but something raw, defiant, and deeply political. “In times of migration, modernisation, war, and upheaval,” the festival states, “nostalgia becomes a tool of resilience… bridging time through storytelling, art, and cultural expression.”
Two standout events this year are doing just that, one through music, the other through fiction and memory.
Akram Abdulfattah | Saturday 19th July, 8pm | Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room | £16.50
Palestinian-American violinist Akram Abdulfattah returns to the UK stage with a sound that’s both ancient and audacious. Fusing jazz with Middle Eastern and Indian traditions, his set bends borders and timelines, carrying echoes of ancestral music through Turkish, Persian, and Hindu influences, yet grounded in modern improvisation.
Fresh from acclaimed appearances at Knockengorroch and Cambridge Folk Festival, Abdulfattah brings a global sound rooted in resilience. His music isn’t just beautiful, it’s a sonic act of remembrance, a soundtrack for diaspora, and a live expression of nostalgia’s fiercest truth: we remember because we must.
Palestine Minus One | Wednesday 16th July, 7–8.30pm | The Bluecoat | £5
In parallel, Comma Press launches Palestine Minus One, a bold new anthology that rips open the silence around 1948’s Nakba. Edited by Basma Ghalayini, the book asks ten Palestinian writers, including Mazen Maarouf and Anwar Hamed, to reimagine the lead-up to the catastrophe through speculative, supernatural, and surrealist lenses. These aren’t mere stories; they’re alternate futures, haunted pasts, and radical acts of narrative resistance.
This conversation, chaired by Comma’s Ra Page, is more than literary – it’s an excavation of inherited trauma and collective memory, with each writer a witness and each page a reckoning.
Together, these events are LAAF 2025 at its most urgent: where heritage isn’t just celebrated, it’s interrogated; where memory isn’t static, but alive and roaring.
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The Broken Spine is a poetry and arts collective proudly published on the coastal edge of North-West England. Founded in 2019 by Alan Parry and Paul Robert Mullen – two school friends reunited after twenty years through a mutual love of poetry.
