When Palestinian writer Basim Khandakji learned that his novel had won the 2024 Arabic Booker Prize, he was not at a ceremony or in front of cameras. He was in a cell. Moments after the news broke, guards entered, beat him, tied his wrists and ankles, and moved him into solitary confinement for nearly two weeks.
The punishment, he believes, was meant to remind him that recognition could not outshine captivity.
For 21 years, Khandakji lived inside Israel’s prison system, serving three life sentences imposed when he was 21. Now 42, he walks free—but not home. Barred from returning to his family in Nablus, he waits in Egypt, a writer without a homeland.
“I still fear I’ll wake up and find the walls around me again,” he said after his release.
Khandakji describes the years behind bars as a long experiment in breaking the human spirit. He spent months in isolation, was shuttled among prisons, and watched fellow inmates waste away. “Starvation, humiliation, medical neglect—it was policy, not accident,” he says.
Since late 2023, reports of deaths inside Israeli prisons have risen sharply. Detainees, especially those taken from Gaza, began dying “with shocking regularity,” Khandakji recalls. Some prisoners, he says, saw bodies left hanging in cells or packed together in corners.
“The goal was always to make us forget that we were people,” he said quietly.
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The experience has left him marked but not silent. His writing, composed under the gaze of guards, now stands as both testimony and defiance.
Freedom, however, feels incomplete. The man who once imagined worlds from behind bars now lives in enforced distance from his own.
“I’m free,” he says, “but freedom without home is another kind of cell.”