Join us for the book launch of Nyla Matuk's latest book "Leila and Khaled".
This novel confronts present-day love with the trauma of the Nakba to tell the story of a scholar returning for the first time to the occupied land her family was exiled from.
Date: Sunday, October 4, 2026
Venue: TIFF Lightbox, 350 King St W
Time: 3:00 PM (more details closer to the event)
Book signing to follow event. Purchase books via this form for a special 20% discount. (Regular priced books available at TIFF store)
The event is copresented by Anansi Press and Another Story Bookshop.
Book Description:
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.
Bios:
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.
