"Once my engagement with any text as a writer finishes, and it's finally published or appears in book form, I never return to it as a reader. I do not know why the idea of reading my own published texts repulses me, but I know that reading books written by others is a lifeline."

"I always ask myself what kind of terrible things I could commit. This is a question for any human being."

"Linguistic erasure on maps is where you first experience the betrayal of language; the erasure of Palestine from the map continues today. Your linguistic consciousness from an early age is built on reading these omissions. This is something I think I’ve been concerned with since the first text I wrote."

"I’m fascinated by what borders try to prevent, and why. And sometimes by how their meaning and the perception of them shifts from one situation to another."

"Differences between people are used to commit injustice—that was an early lesson about racism."

"There was a certain period of time a person could either be inside or outside of Palestine. But now our being is always mingled with so many places at the same time."

"If you are listening, it becomes so natural that you care, and you create a connection of care toward others that is not limited to the borders of the nation-state"

"As one lives in a place that seems like a punishment for a crime they didn’t commit, it raises harsh questions in relation to simple ideas like justice, or it’s absence, at an early age...maybe the realization of the repeated injustice that one cannot escape in the context of Palestine was the first force to push me early on into literature."

"to “think about” Palestine is already a position of privilege that I would not like to engage with. My concern with Palestine is a personal one, not a literary one. It forms my literature; but my literature is never about Palestine. It is rather within and from Palestine as a condition of injustice; of the normalization of pain and degradation."

"People may gain from literature what they cannot get from their own lives. It’s not escapism but rather a kind of openness."

"In the last twenty years, the separation between Palestinians and Israelis has become much more severe than before. You feel the inequality. You feel the privileges—it’s how the state works in a racist system, how certain groups are privileged over others. The question why it should be like this comes up at an early age—to a child, the situation is just incomprehensible. You are surprised—how could this be? Is there something wrong with me?"

"I’m open to where life leads me."

"Real refugees live in real refugee camps. Photo opportunities with celebrities call for movie sets. Army privates, starved for weeks and stuck in the stockade, are conscripted to act like refugees and thereafter either assassinated or promoted, depending on the things that these sorts of things usually depend on."

"Is this dementia, desperation, or Machiavellian mischief? It occurs to me that the course of the world is perhaps set in motion but idiocy so convoluted it is rendered complex."

"Men like me, we are necessary because we unite those we recruit to keep us in power, and we unite those who have been recruited to put different versions of us in power. It is just like Woody Allen says, in a revolution oppressors become oppressed and vice versa."

"“People like me,” he says, “are either in power and fighting to stay in power, or we are not in power and fighting to be in power.”"

"“How did he die?” “Firing squad.” The Brigadier-General snorts. “I do not much care for comedies,” he says."

"Does circumstance reveal character or create it?"

"I inspire women in science all over the world, and more so in Africa."

"This award helps to put African science and scientists firmly on the map. We can bring positive and meaningful change to our communities through effective research, innovation and leadership."

"I feel the urgency with dealing with these [infectious disease] problems because I have experienced them up close."

"It makes me appreciate the community that transformed a little girl growing up in Kenya into an international award-winning scientist."

"here’s a toast to you."

"The closest comparison I can give is with COVID-19. When it hit Western countries, we all felt it: the pain of lockdown; of losing someone; of being ill ourselves. We felt that urgency, that we needed a vaccine and we needed it yesterday, so we said, ‘let's do it, let's do everything that we can’. For diseases that are far off, that sense of urgency is lost."

"When you come into a place, it is really important to see people who are achieving things,” Professor Osier said. “If you come into a place where people are dead wood, however brilliant you may be, you are going to become dead wood yourself."

"The journey towards the development of a malaria vaccine is bumpy. It involves understanding highly evolved parasites that can replicate while hidden within the cells of their hosts."

"The second angle of our research aims to understand how the immune system handles the complexity of the malaria parasite. For example, if it produces antibodies, we need to identify the parasite proteins to which the antibodies are binding and the mechanisms they are using. To do this, we probe the parasite with antibodies from people who have developed resistance to malaria parasite."

"I had three late miscarriages and one early and that took a long while to recover from. Some women have children with serious disabilities."

"If you go to a region with a lot of malaria, you find that only the children get seriously sick and the adults are basically immune. I wanted to understand the process that makes adults immune to malaria."

"As you move up it becomes harder because you’ll be distracted by dramas and sideshows, but remember that they’re not the main story."

"I am a reluctant clinician."

"Malaria still claims the lives of hundreds of thousands of children each year and has a major economic impact on the lives of many in sub-Saharan Africa. Children that survive severe malaria can be left with permanent physical disability that takes many forms."

"My average day has evolved over the years as I have graduated from being a junior to a more senior researcher. Earlier on, I’d spend a lot of time in the laboratory generating data and less time in the office reading scientific literature, analysing data and writing up my work."

"whatever you have in your hand to do, if you give it your whole heart and all your energy, it will give you a lot of dividends."

"As a woman who wants to have a rounded life, you will want children at some point. You have to accept that you enjoy all that comes with having children which will have a cost on how far your career can go."

"The Wellcome Trust has been instrumental to getting me established as a credible African research scientist. I competed and won a training fellowship that supported my PhD studies. My current work is supported by an intermediate fellowship, and this has enabled me to compete successfully for an MRC/DFID African Research Leader award."

"I joined the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in 1998 as a junior doctor and was interested in training in paediatrics. It was here that I was introduced to research on malaria in general, and begun to understand that we know so little about this disease that has been with humans for such a long time."

"When will we have a malaria vaccine"

"The fact that people are developing immunity to malaria all around me – I feel that this process is staring me in the face- if you like, and I must be able to see and understand how it is happening."

"I try to understand how adults in Africa learn to live in harmony with the parasite responsible for malaria, such that infections do not make them ill. This knowledge could help us design vaccines that would protect children, who can die as a result of a malaria infection."

"“Women will perform as well as men if they are given the right education, incentives, access to financing, property and land. … Empowering women is empowering a nation.”"

"Africa’s food systems have become fragile because they are highly vulnerable to climate change and, as a result, to all sorts of shocks."

"I reflect with immense pride on our transformative journey over the past ten years"

"“Agriculture is how I got here. Agriculture sustained my family, but it was not about food. It got my family out of poverty.”"

"“Climate change is quickly becoming the most significant challenge facing our planet, and I am committed to working with other partners and stakeholders to address this critical issue."

"Because we’re a small institution and we don’t have a whole lot of money, we focus on trying to be catalytic.”"

"“Be prepared to work hard but also be prepared to do the hard stuff.”"

"“The key to Africa’s prosperity? Cultivating ‘agropreneurs’”"