Gazan Publisher, Late Ukrainian Writer Receive Publisher Group’s Prix Voltaire Award

Bravery takes many forms, and since 2006 the International Publishers Association has honored publishers who have upheld the standards and justice and inquiry  in their published work either across decades or “amid pressure, threats, intimidation or harassment, be it from governments, other authorities or private interests.” The honor takes the form of the IPA Prix Voltaire, and this year the award has been made to the Samir Mansour Bookshop for Printing and Publishing, a 20-plus-year-old Gaza-based publishing house of local content that has been destroyed twice, most recently just after the October 7 massacres that heralded the current Israeli-Gazan war.

The International Publishers Association made the award at an incongruously gala event held December 4 in Guadalajara, Mexico as part of the biennial International Publishers Congress. Samir Mansour delivered a thank you, via video. “In 2021 my bookshop was completely destroyed,” he testified. “It was rebuilt in 2022. During the current war, the bookshop was also destroyed again and the second branch of the library bookshop was destroyed. However, I am still continuing my work which I grew up with and was raised in since my childhood. I am still publishing despite being on the Gaza strip. God willing us, we will continue to publish and print, no matter how difficult the circumstances we are living today. We will continue.”

The IPA also awarded a Prix Voltaire Special Award – an honor awarded posthumously – to the Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina, who stopped writing fiction after the Russian invasion and began probing war crimes. Her award had a special resonance at IPA, since in 2023 she had presented that year’s Special Award in honor of Volodymyr Vakulenko. In her investigatory role, Amelina had uncovered diaries Vakulenko had hidden in his garden; she then helped see those diaries published. Amelina died on July 1, 2023, four days after she was injured when a Russian missile hit the restaurant where she was dining with three other writers. Her award was received by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, CEO of the Center for Civil Liberties.

IPA’s president, Karine Pansa, connected the important role publishing and publishers play during violent times, calling Mansour, Amelina and others “beacons of hope amidst immense devastation.”

Four other brave publishers appeared on a shortlist with Mansour that was initially announced in May. Those publishers were:

•  Aslambek Ezhaev, whose Ummah Publishing in Russia tries to preserve important Russian Islamic literature, especially in the wake of the Russian-Chechen War.
• Dušan Gojkov, whose Balkan Literary Herald in Serbia “works to limit censorship, violence, and death threats towards writers and academics while also working to mitigate rising tensions in the delicate environment of the post-conflict Balkans.”
• Andrej Januskevic, whose Andrej Januskevic Publishing in Belarus battles against repression and censorship seen since the Russia -Ukraine war. He was jailed in Belarus and now publishes out of Poland.
• Osman Kavala in Turkey, who advocates for free expression and reconciliation between Turks and Armenians.

The Prix Voltaire comes with a CHF 10,000 prize, roughly US $11,400 or £8,940.

Mansour, who has six children, received substantial donations after Israeli airstrikes totalled his original bookshop in Gaza City in 2021. Those contributions from a global campaign allowed him to actually triple the size of his original shop. The IPA called his bookstore “a critical part of the local community in Gaza, publishing the works of Palestinian authors and housing thousands of books in various languages,” and it notes that despite its damage in 2023 it has both reopened and published 17 new titles this year. Those titles include several with a pedagogic or social science bent, including (translated from Arabic) Modeling: Applied Spaces in Research and Practical Fields by Yahya Abu Jahajouj, Detailed Analysis of Textbook by Yahya Abu Jahajouj, Positive Psychology by Amal Joda, and We Are Not Rocks: Thoughtful Abstracts for the Contemporary Educational Landscape by Hossam Shehada.