Shortlisted for the PEN Heaney Prize 2025

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Something about Living is the brilliant third collection from acclaimed poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

It explores Palestinian life through the lens of language, revealing a legacy of obfuscation and erasure. What happens when language only permits ongoing disasters to be packaged neatly for consumption and subsequent disposal? Searing with insights from the perspective of a Palestinian in diaspora, Something about Living refuses to cede ground to nihilism and apathy, taking the reader through the difficult landscape of hope and futurity in the midst of an interminable, uncertain, and often devastating present.

Prizes

Winner of George Ellenbogen Poetry Award 2025 (United States),Winner of National Book Award for Poetry 2024 (United States),Winner of Akron Poetry Prize 2022

Tuffaha’s most recent collection is essential reading. Something about Living should be in every classroom, every library. This is a rallying cry at its most lyrical, most poignant. I can’t say it enough: you need to read this book. —The Poetry Question (Podcast)

This superb volume sings of those determined to fight for a fairer future. —Publishers Weekly

In evoking historical episodes of slaughter, expulsion, and attempted erasure, Tuffaha neither isolates nor simply commemorates them. Instead, she exposes their perpetuation in the air and soil of the present day, as the state of Israel sustains and escalates a genocide against the Palestinian people. —Poetry North West

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024; the87press, 2025), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honourable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honourable mention of the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.