“The family group chat in times of war” by Abu Leila (Room 49.1 No Future For Who? Sneak Peek)

Abu Leila is a writer interested in love, violence and revolution. They work across fiction, poetry & non-fiction, on page and on the stage.

Their pamphlet ‘The family group chat in times of war’ is upcoming in January 2027 with fourteen poems.

Their work, preserving family histories of anti-colonial resistance, was shortlisted for the 2024 Wasafiri new writing prize and won the 2024 Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Prize. Their writing on sex and gender today and in the Ancient Middle East won the 2022 Bridport Prize and the London Writers Awards. Their story about a really angry woman won a bronze 2025 Creative Futures Award. They are an a Barbican Young Poet, and their poetry has been published in the Bad Betty Press anthology “Field Notes on Survival”, recreated as a stone carving at the Bloomsbury Festival and performed in Kolkata, India with the Queer Muslim Project. They are currently working on their first novel. Abu Leila hopes to see the fall of imperialism and capitalism in their lifetime.