FESTIVAL 2026

Leila and Khaled

by Nyla Matuk

House of Anansi Press

FESTIVAL 2026

Leila and Khaled

by Nyla Matuk

House of Anansi Press

Synopsis

Two Palestinians search for a language of love amid the ruins of dispossession.

Leila, a Palestinian Canadian film scholar, joins a delegation of academics on her first journey to Occupied Palestine. What begins as an intellectual pilgrimage becomes an intimate, destabilizing return to an ancestral land her family was exiled from. There, she meets Khaled—a younger Palestinian man who pulls her into a mesmeric trance of desire, curiosity, and confrontation. Their brief, charged affair unfolds in a landscape shaped by rupture and resistance, each of them bearing different inheritances of the same loss. Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning—a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.

About the Author

Nyla Matuk was born in Winnipeg and lives in Montreal. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry: Sumptuary Laws, shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, and Stranger. She is also the editor of an anthology of poems, Resisting Canada. 

Read more about Nyla Matuk

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